hey, what fun is that if you are going to stackin one post, I might have to use MY 3471

yep, looks like you have a nasty case of Troll-bite there. Hold on and I'll suck out the worst of the poison, but you will have complete the healing process yourself...

FACT: Several other manufacturers and BFL have been producing mining equipment starting last year and early this year.
FACT: BFL had significant delays, and a 4x difference in projected and actual power utilization, even after shipping started it remained slow for some time.
FACT: BFL started taking preorders back in July, some folks have been waiting on them since then, impatiently
FACT: BFL stated initially that they would be shipping October, and at some point updated that to October/November.
FACT: BFL updated their unit to be more competetive, and has blamed some of their challenges on this
FACT: BFL has not yet made any statements that shipping would not begin before the end of November. They have told BitCoin Magazine that they would be shipping late in November, but they have never said they would start in December.
FACT: BFL has stated an intention to ship all preorders through September "by the end of the year" (IIRC, not sure about when they made the statement, thought it was early October)
FACT: BFL has invested in (new/upgraded) board level fabrication and assembly tools for use in batches after the first one
FACT: BFL has Millions of dollars in preorders, outside investors watching them, and huge community pressure to deliver on time and in spec

Supposition: BFL is very motivated to succeed, are not likely to take off with the money, and will in fact deliver a product, within their October/November timeframe, or tell us that they are missing it. Until we hear that they are shipping or delayed we get to wait.

Some folks are not so good at waiting, so if you notice someone saying in the 35th thread that BFL is a scam and are stealing all the money, just hit the little link under their name that says "ignore" and get on with it. If something bad enough to really get concerned about happens, you will see reputable posters talking about it quickly enough.

(If anyone sees errors above or has updated information, please let me know and I'll update the post.)

Let's see...
GDP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product

Current world GDP: $70Tn
1% of current GDP: $700Bn
2016 BTC (easy math): 14Mn

Value per BTC: $50,000

Wow, let's try again with the currency supply http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_(currency):

Current world Curency Supply (M0): $4Tn
1% of current Currency Supply: $40Bn
2015 BTC (easy math): 12Mn
BTC: $3,333

Still wow.

Either way, the point is valid. Big official scrutiny and/or attempted takeover is a serious possibility. I think it will hit the fan and we will get a solid indication well before $500

True, I don't think it's coming soon from the existing players, maybe a new party in 12 months? Existing in 18-24? if ever it is worth enough (to justify development and) to sell dedicated (and even more specialized) ASIC.

On the Scrypt ASIC thing, I think it's less hard than it sounds. Scrypt is just a Salsa20/8 core with a sha2 core before and after it, with enough DRAM to store the inflight variables or external RAM and a memory controller. It's all mainstream IP, there is even the VHDL I lined to over at opencores for Salsa20 (/8 means it is Salsa20 with limited iterations). So we really just need someone who thinks there in enough profit in plumbing them together and getting it fabbed, same as the Bitcoin ASIC's.

Right now there are ~$60k worth of LTC being generated each month (30 days at current difficulty, at current full network hashrate) compared to $2.6M each month worth of BitCoins, and we are just hitting the point where ASIC makes sense on Bitcoin. I think Litecoin mining is going to have to be worth a LOT more (30-40x?) before someone invests in the ASIC implementation.

Hmm, let's run this through a couple scenarios for this. (I'm just kludging them together, feel free to shoot at the principles, but the specifics are made up to create outsized issues that my brain can get a handle on)

Environment:
ASIC is out and humming, technology is stable and no preorders are on the horizon that will change things.
Bitcoin mining with current equipment over 12 months results in a ~100% profit according to common current projections.
50% of mining income is used to buy new hardware to keep up with other miners.

Event: Bitcoin loses 50% value
Result: Miners are in survival mode, those who cannot afford the outlay have to put equipment purchases on hold, and bleed devalued bitcoins paying for electricity. difficulty slows or drops as some gear is deemed too unprofitable to afford to run and is powered down.

Event: Bitcoin gains 100% value
Result: Miners are in bonanza mode, profit taking and large hardware purchases will be popular, difficulty will shoot up with this new gear until some equilibrium is reached.

Event: Protocol change renders 50% of mining equipment useless (I know it's out there, but I could not think of another big forcing)
Result: 50% of miners are dancing in the street as their BTC profits go up 100%, other 50% want to kill them. Some of the excess profits will go towards new hardware, as will some investment by the failed miners replacing obsolete hardware, some will drop out entirely. Price may be effected by 20-minute blocktimes for up to 2 weeks, but it would only qualify as a panic, not a factually based reaction. After the On the whole the same amount of BTC is generated, and sold to others who want to buy or are selling hardware.

Event: New Big Fish 1 and New Big Fish 2 start fighting over BitCoin, increasing difficulty by 100% over 3 months
Result: Massive increase in difficulty because of governments or megacorps doing speculative mining with millions of dollars in custom fabbed hardware. Tinfoil hats hold a party, others are annoyed that "The Man" is making his own bitcoins instead of buying ours. Value of Bitcoin shoots up due to difficulty conflict, but only because of the perceived legitimacy, not because the difficulty is high. Many miners shut down inefficient capacity, but some keep some running for ideological reasons.

That's my take on those 4 scenarios, in my scorebook it's pretty obvious that 1 and 2 would happen, and it demonstrates the implied causation between price and difficulty. 3 and 4 are a bit more of a stretch, but in each case I found that the root cause of the price and the difficulty change was largely the same, with the differences in all 4 scenarios being transitory until mining capacity matches price, not the other way around.

I think you are right that there is a short term force applied on the price if there is a large difficulty swing, but I think it's noise compared with the actual event, or the phase of the moon http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/36301/2/b2092645.0001.001.pdf.

According to their business plans and published statements? None of them are running final gear right now, and none of them are using it to mine on MainNet (nor will they)

They are all working with prototypes and simulations with just-in-time manufacturing for initial batches. Watch the updates in the BFL and bASIC threads and you can see things moving, but stuff gets in from China, gets flashed and tested, and goes right out the door with Tom. BFL is likely in the same boat.

Maybe they have had a prototype or 2 running, but they are using testnet-in-a-box, so we won't see the hashes even if they do. Until they have final hardware there is not much point to running a prototype board continuously, especially if there are material differences in components between the two.


My favorite explanation if there IS a surge, I mean Duuuuuuude! You tell a few million Uni students about this (with an ear back to mommy that a new video card is needed for the computational mathematics class they are taking) and you are going to have 1000+ new miners easy. Same for FPGA (yeah, I really need the Vertex 7 Board!) ASIC might be a bit harder sell

At this point, I think they know well enough that Josh would have shut the heck up about it.

Instead he got more confrontational (IMHO, maybe it was just a bad day) which would point towards increased confidence.

Within 10% at least, he was willing to stake BTC1000 on it!

FYI, all haters that think BFL is going to skip town or other complete fail should be answering "#DIV/0!"

Condolences FLHippy.

It sounds like he can be found on Fiddlers Green, I'm sure they'll have plenty of rum.

FYI, if you have not noticed, there is a theme here.

This is much more of a "Business that is on the Internet" and less of an "Internet Business", it's like a corner computer store that happens to be across the country/planet.

Tom is a great guy, call his phone and he helps.

If the is the full ML605 I think that has a DDR3 interface on it. That would in theory allow you to use some of your SP's to add load/store for a large number of inflight scrypt attempts.

I don't think this one will be as easy to build a bitstream for as BitCoin was, and any FPGA without a large high-speed RAM capability is going to be limited to an insanely low performance (think 1000 cycles per attempt without any pipe-lining.)

At a high level the challenge is going to be handling the random requests for a portion of the large random vector that is used by scrypt. This means that each pipline will need to manage enough parallel processes per engine to keep the pipeline full during the 30-50 clock cycle memory lookups, since we are not using Block RAM.

If someone wants to use this information to build the code, then at a high level I think it could work. I'll happily work with any experienced FPGA devs that have an appropriate board, but I don't have the programming skills to put this together solo, or a board staring me in the face demanding I put it to work.

No, it was doing salsa20, but not the full mining algo. This is the hard part of Litecoin though, the memory intensive part that makes stock FPGA bitcoin mining rigs unsuitable for Litecoin.

I was mostly linking to the resource for anyone who wants to incorporate parts of the design detailed in the paper into an FPGA or ASIC based LiteCoin miner. There is a ton of stuff out there already to springboard from, even an open source VHDL scrypt implementation: http://opencores.org/websvn,listing?repname=salsa20&path=%2Fsalsa20%2F&rev=1
This unit, a couple SHA2 units, some golden_nonce detection and you can have Litecoin a ASIC in 6 months with the right folks and a couple hundred thousand dollars. Most likely we will see an FPGA generation built before ASIC is profitable for Litecoin.

BTW, nothing says someone couldn't create an ASIC that could use SHA2, salsa20/8, and other future algorithms on the same chip, but each algo will need to justify it's own design time and die space.

Look back up at the quote I used 3 posts ago.

The ASIC's are "in fabrication" which means they have taped out and are somewhere in the mask/wafer/die making process.

Honestly I think he announced it within a week or 2 of the bASIC announcement. He held off opening things up until he had finished his prep work, and it sounded like he even had an ugly hack of a prototype at that time.

Anyone who have not taped out yet is unlikely to deliver before the end of the year, and I'm pretty sure even Avalon has already passed the tape-out mark, now that I think back.

The PCB Design and layout is independent, and much easier than the tape-out process, so it generally comes after the parts specifics are final to prevent rework (like another manufacturer is likely doing)

Russia is a member of the security council at the UN. If not for this permanent veto power we would see sanctions being considered and/or enacted on Russia. Same with China.

Did you think the 1% principle only applied to people?

Iran is not on the council, so the bar is much lower to get folks to agree to pressuring them. This is part of the reason why we see sanctions against Iran but not Russia or China.
(they are also already part of the "Nuclear Club" that are allowed by international law to possess nuclear devices, and they have a self interest in not allowing Iran to join this club, so they will go along even when there is good business selling non-competitive or knock-off equipment, or arms to them.)

Edit, updated for clarity

Here, current status from the enemy thread m'lord!


I believe that the mask set has been created and they are waiting on the wafer run, but I have not seen detail on those stages recently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape-out Tape-out simply means that they have sent the files to the manufacturer to make the masks.

Actually they have inhouse assembly capability to some extent, so they are ahead of the pack as far as diversification of sources. All the other manufacturers have the same issue, but since they have gone from 0-60 in about 6 months (assuming full preorder shipments by EoY) the risk of having to respin and delay an extra 6-8 weeks would be considered minor compared with a whole second set of masks and batches half the size.


At the volumes we are talking about here is does not make any sense to negotiate and maintain multiple contracts for each part, maybe down the road if mining is a multi-billion dollar industry someday ($1000 bitcoins?) We are already talking about what the fabs would call "marginal quantities" at the quantities we are asking for. It's not like BFL put in for 100,000 7.5GH/s chips/month or something, they did a lot run of ~25,000 by current mining estimates, and will do another in a month or 2, or maybe they invested in 100k and are planning on selling them well into the new year (which would explain some of the longevity statements we have seen)

In any event they are not producing millions of these things like they are iPhones, it's just low thousands (or dozens for MiniRigs)

That issue is pretty much dead and buried. There have been statements from all the manufacturers (except ASICMINER who have a different model) that they will be using either Testnet in a box (bASIC, BFL) or custom testing software (ngzhang)

I agree, there will always be some chance that some mainnet mining could happen and we would never know, but that would be a direct contradiction of public statements that would serve as grounds for a lawsuit IRL. There are always people that are going to call them on it, but the statements are out there, and until any evidence to the contrary comes up I believe that they have passed the bar (by having a significant number of current satisfied customers and massive buy-in in the form of preorders, as well as communicating and updating their plans in a fairly coherent, if not optimal, way) to have their statements believed, but verified. BFL is doing a tour, Tom is taking on volunteer workers, and tons of folks are glued to their market and mining monitors like they are Oracles, hoping to a spike that might be ASIC testing.

Given the scrutiny they are under, risks to personal liberty and livelihood, likelihood of being caught (we know who they are), as well as the limited rewards (mining hawks see 1% deltas and freak out, what happens if they see 3TH come online at once? and that only has a return of $100k over 2 weeks) the idea of them changing their policies, or tolerating their employees sneaking units out the back door, is simply absurd.

FYI, if someone does violate the policy we have a nice class action lawsuit on our end, employee prosecution on their end, and BFL in the middle. Ain't no way they want to be in that pickle.

Edit: I understand about old info, no trolling intended, sorry about the knee-jerk assumption.

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