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I bid 1@ 1.9 BTC
This is an auction. You can't split an auction lot and bid. You can withdraw your bid or bid on the 26 shares. Sam. |
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How much were shares originally, how many shares were issued?
1BTC per share. 7x 4 module units were purchased in total so around 715 shares or about 3.6%. Total hashing power is around 600Gh/s. Bitsyncom state they'll start shipping batch 3 in 10 days time. We have a private forum at http://yourcoins.org/forums . Coinhoarder will host the hardware and administer dividends. Cheers, Sam. |
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Original GroupBuy thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157930.0Auction is for 26 BTC worth of shares in CoinHoarder's avalon group buy. Bidding starts at 1.9 BTC per share. Only bid in 0.1 BTC increments or greater. Please bid in terms of BTC per share e.g. 1.9 (not 28.5). Bidding ends on Sunday 28th April 2013 midnight UTC. I will PM winner with details. Good luck. |
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samborambo; 30; 2.58;1AGhDfa7f2yceKeD4qATDFqYKVJyWzc2sd
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Am i wrong ?
Short answer: Yes. Long answer: You were so close! You mentioned 0.42A @ 5V (2.1W) remaining power budget. The ASIC consumes 1.7W (1.48A @ 1.15V). Add 5% (0.085W) for online DC-DC power conversion losses and voila; 2.1W - 1.7W - 0.085W = 0.315W power margin. That 15% margin might be handy for some dynamic overclocking, given the right conditions. I went to school for this stuff  I'm an electrical engineer for a municipal utility company, working on several research and development projects. If I can't get simple DC power calcs right, I'd have bigger problems than an overloaded USB port. Powering multiple devices; why not just buy a powered USB hub for $10? |
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-- biggest problem that I see, is that it needs to be passively cooled, I don't expect you would want the extra power drain and bloated size from running a fan or whatever. not sure if this is going to be able to run passively.
If you could build a device like that, everyone I know would be getting them for christmas!
Long answer: A typical junction-ambient thermal resistance for a 48QFN EP part is about 23K/W. So, at 1700mW, the Avalon ASIC will be 39K above ambient. That's a worst case of 80deg C die temperature in uncontrolled environments which may be of concern, depending on the temperature range desired (doesn't meet consumer grade, etc). A small aluminium heatsink or aluminium case would guarantee temperature stability in the most extreme of situations, but is probably not necessary. Short answer: Passive cooling is no problem. Heat dissipated = power input. Dissipating <1.7W of heat is a doddle. Sam. |
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My personal view is that USB stick miners will be incredibly popular and will eventually account for more hashing power than mining rigs/farms. The main reason is risk, or the the lack of it. The average person has no problem spending $20 on a punt; lotteries, betting and gambling are clear evidence of this. But what if this $20 punt was several orders of magnitude better odds than gambling? Make these units accessable - put them in a big dump stack at every 7-11 right next to the lottery poster. You'll sell millions.
Thats what i dont get yet. How will it happen that these sticks will become such a big part of the net? I mean $25 is a good price... for a ready made stick. If you hand out a plan and 3 chips then i know for sure that 99% will let it lie in the corner because of the work. So it would need many hours of work to get all these sticks ready made for selling. That would either mean the price is rising or it means you would need many volunteers that work for free. I believe that will be a hard task. Yep, that would have to be a ready-built, consumer grade (eg: idiot proof) product, like I said; *snip*
I'm not a fan of making a through-hole soldering kit. Way too geeky and more expensive than a fully built and tested SMT device. While work with 250MHz, physical wiring tolerances are a concern. A large blob of solder in the wrong place may be OK at DC but at 250MHz, couples signals to other tracks. Happy to help with an SMT design.
*snip*
That means the software needs to be super easy, too. If the economics stack up, we could include enough flash memory for the mining software in Java. Just pop the stick in, the mining software auto-starts with no user intervention. The software generates a new address on first start up and after every sweep transaction. Sweeping the address can only be done with significant user intervention. True plug'n'play. Sam. |
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allten,
Can you consider the option for 12V Molex power also.
My arguments - the PC PSU at 12V (by design) has highest output in term of AMPS. The USb cable is crappy in most cases and it may turn out that wires are too thin for AMPs consumed by Avalon chips. Having the option for 12V could make possible to use both three chips at full sped (clock) + Designing PCB with more than three chips in the feature + plus to add as many boards as we want to a single PSU.
About cooling every one of us will take care. In my personal opinion Passive cooling without airflow is not good at all. But it is just me. I will blow at radiators for sure ...
10X
Nope. The core runs at 1.2V, not 12V. That means a 12V - 1.2V DC-DC converter will need to added to the BOM, significantly increasing the cost of a 'stock' device. If you're after processing power density for your serious mining operation, go buy an Avalon mining rig. Maybe the direction of this project has changed but I saw this as a way of getting hashing power and Bitcoins into EVERYONE's hands, not just greedy profit driven serious miners (like myself, too, I admit). We're aiming to have only slightly worse ROI than a full rig to encourage long term use. My personal view is that USB stick miners will be incredibly popular and will eventually account for more hashing power than mining rigs/farms. The main reason is risk, or the the lack of it. The average person has no problem spending $20 on a punt; lotteries, betting and gambling are clear evidence of this. But what if this $20 punt was several orders of magnitude better odds than gambling? Make these units accessable - put them in a big dump stack at every 7-11 right next to the lottery poster. You'll sell millions. Sam. |
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So once there is a ready made plan for this how will this made going? Groupbuys for the chips and everyone buys the remaining hardware and gets the plans and software for free or how can this work/is planned?
Kickstarter.com? That would be for collecting money. Is that needed here? Buying specialist maybe? We need to secure a lot of capital for the first batch of 10k units. KS is a good way to raise capital while protecting investors if things go pear-shaped before we've got all supply contracts in place. |
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Well, there seems to be enough opposition to going on a security exchange that I am willing to scrap that idea. ATTENTION INVESTORS:First, I have taken some mBTC off of my ownership interest to make our numbers and percentages add up to 100% ownership of the seven Avalons. https://www.dropbox.com/s/7b7omfd7hrbk9gs/Ownership%20Percentages%20%26%20Profit%20Projections.xlsSecond, everyone owns a percentage of ALL Avalon's that the group has ordered. Splitting up interest to each 7 Avalon's and making 7 different payments each month would be an accounting nightmare for me. Although there may be some downside to this for the very first investors, as others have mentioned, there are also advantages to owning a percentage in all of the Avalon's. For instance, if I ever have any technical problems with one of the Avalon's, at least you are still making BTC with the other six. Third, I am willing to commit to a temporary solution to allow the buying and selling of ownership interest at this time. I will allow you guys to transfer/sell/buy shares to whomever you want... people in the group or out of the group, either one. I don't feel like it is fair to say you MUST sell your shares to people already in the group... if someone is offering you 3x what someone in the group will, by all means.. sell your shares to the highest bidder. I have the right to suspend the selling and buying of ownership interests at any time, as this was never covered in the original investment offer, I am only trying to accommodate you guys. Ya'll must take care of all negotiating and transactions yourselves. To avoid people blaming me for transaction errors, all sales of ownership interest MUST be posted as a reply in this thread. The post to inform the group that you have sold your shares should be similar to the following format: I sold 1 BTC of my interest to <insert name> who would like to receive his dividends at <insert bitcoin address>. The amount of shares you're selling must be in BTC. Ownership transactions are non reversible, so make sure you get paid first. I highly recommend you change your password on the forums to something secure, and something that you don't use on any other sites. I will not be held responsible for your account getting hacked and someone selling your shares to themselves.I hope this temporary solution is OK for most of you, thanks, Ch Regarding point 3; Too complicated, error prone, slow, etc. Isn't this the reason we're developing the bitcoin economy? This sort of thing can be completely automated (for the admin end) in bitcoin. For each transfer of share, the seller uses his private key to sign a text block with the buyers bitcoin address and email, handle, whatever. The block is easily authenticated against the sellers address and the database of shareholders updated. When CH wants to run a dividend transaction, he uses a script to format the shareholder table into a bitcoin transcation and calculates the dividends. It doesn't need to be flash. I could write the form/updater script in PHP but there's probably more capable PHP or perl developers here that could do a better job than me, and deliver quickly. Sam. |
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So once there is a ready made plan for this how will this made going? Groupbuys for the chips and everyone buys the remaining hardware and gets the plans and software for free or how can this work/is planned?
Kickstarter.com? |
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Core voltage is 1.2V, not 120V. Right but I did not state the core voltage was 120V. The stated power consumption of an Avalon is 620w @ 120v which is what I used in my estimate. If each chip does indeed use 1.5A each then an Avalon would use more than 43kW so that can't be right. If the core voltage is 1.2V then each chip uses ~24mW by my estimates. Power consumption = amps * volts. Avalon's power consumption at the wall, through the PSU, is ~620w @ 120v, so 5.16 amps @ 120v. The PSU converts that down to +12vdc to feed each of the three modules, figuring ~80% efficiency let's just call that 500w of +12vdc. This is 41.6 amps of +12vdc. Now each module has groups of chips fed by a +12vdc to +1.2vdc converter to feed the cores. ~500w @ +12vdc divided by 240 chips = ~2w per chip BEFORE the losses of the +12vdc to +1.2vdc converter. Those are usually incredibly efficient, let's call it 95%, so 475w of +1.2vdc, 395 amps. I'm sure I'm butchering all the math here with calculating PSU efficiencies and such but this shows 1.979 watts @ +1.2vdc or 1.64 amps per chip. I hope this makes sense to you. With these numbers, 3 of their chips, which provides (63,000/240)*3=786MH/s could be powered by a USB port providing 0.5 amps @ +12vdc. Call it 2 chips to give a nice buffer under the 0.5 amp limit and you have a neat little device. It won't generate crap for BTC though.. better off targeting something in the 5-10 GH/s range. The information i found stated 450W for 3 modules not including PSU. USB is 5VDC nominal +/- 5% limiting the device to 2.5W total. We'd need around 300 - 500mW for micro and clock generation. The rest of your math looks spot on. So far I'm up to to around US$7 in parts, not including the Avalon chip, with a few technical assumptions. Assuming we'd get the avalon for $2 - $5, a unit price for a usb miner under $15 is realistic. For the next generation, hopefully they include a PLL on die! Sam. |
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on the site, it clearly we are selling chips, just gotta get some documentation together before we can move forward.
it's a on going battle with ideology and pragmatism, this is going to take some time, but it'll come.
Thanks for the update. How about just a dump of your design notes with a disclaimer? It'd mean I could get started on the design. Sam. |
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From the various specs i found floating around, core is 256MHz, 1.15 - 1.2v. I/O is 8 lines at 3.3v. I worked out the chip would consume around 1700mW. That'll be at the core voltage so 1.5A per chip should do it. Easily within USB power limits even with a typical DC-DC stage.
Unless we can find a micro that can output a 256MHz secondary oscillator, we need an external oscillator block (if the core - i/o is asynchronous) or a PLL to multiply the micro oscillator.
I'm not a fan of making a through-hole soldering kit. Way too geeky and more expensive than a fully built and tested SMT device. While work with 250MHz, physical wiring tolerances are a concern. A large blob of solder in the wrong place may be OK at DC but at 250MHz, couples signals to other tracks. Happy to help with an SMT design.
I can't be of much help right now. On vacation with just a tablet!
Sam.
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My impression was that ASIC designs are foundry-specific. How do you open-source that? Even if you published the Verilog, what good would it do?
ASIC designs are technology specific but not tied to any machine calibration. They should open source the functional verilog as well as the full mask and specification - a turn key design. Dude, Let us focus with simple things first. They have announce that they will sell chips in bulk. If they publish the PCB designs (Asic Board+Controller +PDU + Components list), It will be more than enough. I do not se a reason why they shall not to do it as long this design is related with their chip. If They do that I am about to buy bulk chips and build my own units and most of us can do. I will bevery happy to do that personaly What about that Ngzhang, Bitsync - I have mailed you a couple of times and no response still That may be good enough for you but still misses the ethos of open source. While they scramble to get their avalons out the door, others could be doing large production runs of the same design or working on extending the original design. This is the whole point of open source hardware. Yifu says he wants decentralised mining competition, I call his bluff. If he doesnt open source it, he was in it for the money all along. |
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My impression was that ASIC designs are foundry-specific. How do you open-source that? Even if you published the Verilog, what good would it do?
ASIC designs are technology specific but not tied to any machine calibration. They should open source the functional verilog as well as the full mask and specification - a turn key design. |
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and the hardware part is not that complicated either. and if they sell the chips (posted at the bottom of the Avalon website) there will be a datasheet on how those work too so.
Would it help if I changed the topic to have HARDWARE in caps? Would that avoid several posts about open sourcing the software? Datasheets are just the tip of the iceberg. For an analogy, it'd be like having to clone software by reading the end user manual. |
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How about a USB stick miner? The current Avalon chip is less than 2.5W, the USB power limit. It's around 275MH/s and could probably be sold for less than $5 in quantity.
Dream on dude Ah, huh. Troll. Ugh, everyone's suddenly an electronics engineer. Interfacing should be a doddle if they've used something industry standard like SPI or I2C. USB design with an 8bit micro and a simple serial bus could be whacked out in an afternoon. Its so much simpler than a big rig design since power conversion design is mostly done for you. USB sticks would make efficient mining resource available to everyone. Want a bit more mining power? Just buy the latest mining stick and shove it in your powered usb hub along with the rest. In fact, fuck it. I'll start a kickstarter project for the mining stick. I just need a spec and a budgetary price from avalon, design the board, start a firmware open source git repo, find a pcb fab, stuffing and testing service and we're away :-) Sam. |
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Hello everyone. I just wanted to introduce myself. I'm excited to be a part of the group. I got 8 BTC in the mix!
Does that equate to roughly a 1/103 (8btc/824btc)? Just checking to see if I have roughly the right numbers. Also, with 8 4mod units we have 640,000 mh? or 640/gh. I enjoy a little trading and collecting. Thanks for any help out there.
Hi, I've been working on the numbers all night and am maybe about 1/2 through confirming investors deposits, payout addresses, and forum names. I took a break to check the forums and.. umm... crunch some more numbers. A crude estimate of your monthly portion of the profits can be calculated by using the following formula: (X-409.08) * .98 * .97 * (Y/715.694) = Your portion of profit in USD Note: Enter X in USD and Y in BTCX= Net profit (without power costs/pool fee/my fee) 409.08 = Power costs I expect to be about $409.08/month .98 = pools 2% fee (may be a little more or less depending on what pool we choose) .97 = my 3% fee Y= your investment in BTC 715.694 = total amount invested in BTC (this number is not exact, but very close) With the above formula, use any Bitcoin mining calculator with these numbers: 595,000 Mh @ 5600 watts. I hope my above math is correct, someone please check me. I have been dealing with numbers with many decimal places for hours now.. at my day job aswell..   Thanks CH. Sounds legit. If the 30 day break even is correct, the mining sindicate should average one block mined every day. So why join a pool? Sam. |
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FINALLY out of newbie exile...
Australia is 230VAC single phase, same as here. Europe is 240V. 63A is the standard pole fuse on a domestic supply here in New Zealand and probably most 220V-240V countries. Loosely speaking, this gives most customers 15kVA of supply in ideal circumstances. In fact, even if you have a 63A pole fuse, your switchboard fuse is likely to be 40A to grade properly with the pole fuse. This give a practical upper limit of 9.6kVA
Electricity supply availability is a concern, depending on the actual fusing circuit breakers, CoinHoarder has. I'm assuming each rig is around 800W = 5600W or 5.6kVA, assuming unity power factor. If CoinHoarder's house is limited to 9.6kVA, boiling the kettle when the light are on will pop the fuse.
More of a concern, though, is dirty power. Yep, I deal with power quality investigations on a regular basis. In short, if a customer's appliance blows up, we (network company) have no evidence that the fault was caused by our network. In actual fact, it probably was but we have to tell the customer to make an insurance claim on the appliance (or "tough luck"). Advanced electronic logging meters will change all that in the near future. Meanwhile, say a voltage spike fries our mining rigs: Even if CH proves it was a network fault, CH can't make an effective warranty or insurance claim. It'd be at least a month or more before the rig(s) are assessed, new rigs built, tested, shipped and commissioned.
I think the idea of co-location was mentioned earlier. I had a quick look at facilities in the states offering 1/4 of a rack for $400/month. That's a pittance for round-the-clock care, clean power, physical security, gobs of bandwidth and backup generators. CH can still get his admin premium. I just want to mitigate risk where feasible to do so.
I guess this is a conversation we'll have over the next month or so before the rigs arrive. Looking forward to making an actual contribution to the network, instead of just speculating.
Sam.
Rack space rent maybe a good idea....but depends on the sort of insurance they offer/cost Australia is 240V also 3 phase is readily available, and I know quite a few houses have it. Including ones I have lived in, the 9.6 KVA sounds realisitc. I think that CoinH, unless he has an upgraded power supply may be in for a bit of "shock" but I hope not he seems to be running a LT farm, and these chew power and it looks like he does not do things by halves He also seems to have 2 separate circus in his house for power so he should be able to use one dedicated to ASICS and the other for house hold Australia changed from 240V to 230V in 2000. Sorry to be pedantic!  I'm confused about the two independent circuits. I'm not sure about Australia but in NZ, buildings are only allowed one point of supply, for safe isolation in the event of a fire, etc. Yep, running 3 phase or upgrading the existing protection on a single may be options. |
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