500 BTC BOUNTY FOR OPENSOURCE BITSTREAM THAT IS FASTER THAN TML *STILL OPEN*

[purelithium]

I don't even have any FPGAs ATM, nor have I ever had any spartans. I just find it interesting that you would NOT release your bitstream for upwards of a 500BTC bounty, while still continuing to mine.

He's an elitist, he wants to have something that other people have so he has a "leg-up" on everyone else, rather than contributing to the community, making it better, AND getting paid for it on top of it all. That's fine, it's his prerogative as the creator of his particular piece of software.

[wizkid057]

I wonder if it would be beneficial to throw the 400(+ ?) BTC bounty into one bitcoin address visible by the community.

Personally, I wish I had the time to devote to this project.

[gmaxwell]

I wonder if it would be beneficial to throw the 400(+ ?) BTC bounty into one bitcoin address visible by the community.
Personally, I wish I had the time to devote to this project.

Or into a multisig escrow.  If people are interested in that I can help set it up, and would be willing to act as an arbitrator for its disbursement.

[cablepair]

This bounty is basically already claimed , the bitstream is nearly completed and will be available to mod miner quad owners next week.

[AmDD]

This bounty is basically already claimed , the bitstream is nearly completed and will be available to mod miner quad owners next week.

SWEET!

[purelithium]

Oh yes! I like that!

[cablepair]

Yeah and the Bitstream is being made compatible with our current protocols so it will just be dropped into BFGMiner instead of our current Bitstream

all end users will have to do is upgrade to the newest BFGMiner and they will see speed increases up to 1Gh/s per board

[purelithium]

Hey Tom, can you make sure you make the bounty address public? I don't know about the other posters that posted about the bounty, but I want to add the meagre 4BTC that I promised.

[irritant]

cablepairs website down?

[BitcoinINV]

This was a great Idea glad the something came from it.

[wizkid057]

Well, I'm glad that this is done. No more TML craziness. Pool TML guys... could have made a few bucks. lol.

[cablepair]

Apparently the 1Gh/s core wont be ready for another week or so. (sorry im as disappointed as you are)

So the Bounty is Still open.

[cablepair]

bounty has been upped

500 BTC BOUNTY OFFERED FOR OPEN SOURCE BITSTREAM THAT IS FASTER THAN TML

STILL OPEN

Requirements:

Must Make Each Spartan-6 Mine at a stable 250Mh/s or higher
Must be compatible with BFGMiner
MUST BE OPENSOURCE
Must work with ModMiner Quad before Bounty is paid


email tom@btcfpga.com

thanks!

[wizkid057]

Just going to quote myself here also:

I'm going to have to go out on a limb here and just say that I feel there is something shady going on with this whole operation.  Based on the numbers, it would be silly to refuse such a hefty bounty for releasing this to the open source community.

Lets take a look and lets say there are 5,000 LX150s miners out there, and lets say 40% of them run the TML software.  I have a feeling that this number is much lower, but, I don't know for sure. (Anyone have these numbers?)

Assuming trends continue and such to extrapolate this estimate, it would take at least a year to generate 700 BTC in profit from commissions at that rate, not counting the costs of running the "signcryption" servers and other operating expenses (time, effort...).

Now also, lets look at the fact that there are many competing technologies and other factors emerging soon that can potentially (many which absolutely will) impact profitability on a commission based project like this:

• Reward halving - 100% chance it will happen - Halves potential profit starting sometime in the next two months
• Competing bitstream - Very very likely - A competing non-commission bitstream which doesn't require the use of proprietary software and servers is released, squashing profit to zero because there is no point in the signcryption overhead
• ASICs - Semi-likely, first on everyone's mind (Personally dont buy it, but...) - Potentially for significant difficulty increase, ie much less profit
• DDoS attacks, network problems, etc - Possible - Signcryption becomes unusable by customers for whatever reason, putting their faith in more stable implementations
• Signcryption hacked - Possible - Lets face it, the LX150 is crammed with just the hashers. Adding any *real* and *strong* encryption just shouldn't be possible with the space constraints. The signcryption is likely a kludge that will be broken given enough effort.  And lets face it, you're not going to win any copyright lawsuits against anonymous hackers.
• Many more I'm not thinking of at the moment...

So, given all these reasons and more, the logical thing to do would be to accept the bounties and be done with the whole deal while it is on the table, saving over a year of time waiting on commissions under a perfect no problems scenario, which is unlikely.

I can pretty much guarantee that at least one of the above items (including reward halving, which is definite) will happen before you reach 700 BTC in commission profits.

NOW, all of that said, it should be obvious that any sane developer would accept the bounty.  Why would this particular developer potentially not accept this given all of these obstacles?

I can think of a few possible reasons... and I will note that I have not confirmed any of these in any way and they are all simply speculation:

• The core uses code that would violate copyrights if revealed - This is probably the most likely.  It would also mean that the bitstream is already in violation of that copyright just that no one is able to tell without the source code.
• The core does things in addition to what is advertised - It is entirely possible (since all work is fed through TMLs servers) that data in addition to work is being sent/received by the core.  It is entirely possible that TML is *already* collecting "commission" on the use of the core and mining software without anyone knowing by sneaking additional work in via the "signcryption" to either another hashing ring or mixing it in with part of the others.  This would be far more profitable than the actual commission structure publicly outlined, and impressive since it would mean that the cores are actually faster than advertised.
• The signcryption is a kludge - Its possible (and likely) that the actual encryption in the core is very weak. Since hashing at these speeds will take up a good majority of the chip's physical space it would be near impossible to put any strong encryption into the core along with the hashers.  I'm going to say that it is very unlikely that the encryption is implemented as described, "interwoven into the actual hashing core" since modifying the SHA256 approach would be futile, since the core itself needs to know if the hash beats the target difficulty BEFORE it is encrypted in any way.
  In any case, this is likely because releasing this in source code form would hurt reputation, since its not nearly as effective as claimed.
• Many more, but, lots of speculation here.

Any of the above are possible since this is closed source code that is running on these chips. You literally have NO IDEA what it could be doing.  (I personally will not be running any TML software on my chips/PCs for this reason, not counting the lack of failover/stability).

Now, lets say that that any of the above are true.  Then releasing the code as it stands would be a bad thing for TML.  HOWEVER, aside from the copyright issue, the others could easily be solved by removing useless code.  We don't need to know nor care how the signcryption works.  We don't need to know that there was code in the core designed to shift more hashing power to TML than intented, or any other potentially shady code.  Strip that out, release the code, you get paid, everyone is happy.

So, all in all, there is no legitimate reason I can come up with for the core not to be open sourced if it is in fact legitimate to begin with.  There is far more to gain from the bounty.

I also will put out there that if no other bitstream is released to rival TML soon (next few months, I'd say, tops), I will make it a point to shift efforts into perfecting my personal bitstream and ensure it's release well before TML could make more profit than the offered bounties.

All of that said, I hope people have a better understanding of this entire situation, and I hope that TML will reconsider their stance on declining the offered bounties.

-wk

[BitcoinINV]

what everyone fails to note is a bitstream can build a asic lol best bitstream builds fastest Asic..... just saying for those who do not know how that works. There are places that will copy FPGA = ASIC but is supposed to be 10-25% faster and 60% cheaper. So if you do make a bitstream make sure it is public!

[wizkid057]

what everyone fails to note is a bitstream can build a asic lol best bitstream builds fastest Asic..... just saying for those who do not know how that works. There are places that will copy FPGA = ASIC but is supposed to be 10-25% faster and 60% cheaper. So if you do make a bitstream make sure it is public!

FPGA -> ASIC is not really the most efficient process.  And its only cheaper in HUGE quantities.

I don't see how this is relevant to the topic at hand, though.

[cablepair]

this has nothing to do with ASIC and yes one of the requirements of the bounty is that the bitstream must be open source.

My sole purpose for this bounty was to give my FPGA customers a boost and help them out in profitability for the last couple months before ASICs ship.

However if this bounty is not collected soon I will probably close it because it will just be too close to ASIC deployment and there will be no point

[mistfpga]

So you ask why I am not doing disclosure for 400-150=250 BTC ? :-) quite ridiculous - I can just wait few days and get these 250 BTC :-) Why I have to bother with this deal at all ? Especially in its original sense where cablepair wants finished bitstream for these boards ? ;-)

And why do you think I may want to increase profits for those sparan-chip owners ? What is the reason ? If you find - I want vice-versa - who will increase my profits for free ? :-)) I really would appreciate :-) I have 200 gh/s and want very much 1.5 x profit improvement RIGHT NOW!!!!
Please please help :-)))))))) for free of course :-))) So I'll get all of profit from your help WAITING ..... :-)

tbh, do you reckon it will work on those boards? is it different to the one we were talking about?  I wish tom had talked to you guys about the asic design... tbh it would even be worth him giving you 15%+ for help.

I have to say, as much as bitfury is teasing everyone, he is the real deal... and if he says he can do this, he can do it. he is also a pretty stand up guy.

I have been away for a while and thought I would see what you are upto mr fury didnt read the rest of the thread only his last post. sorry if this has been already covered.

have fun.

steve

EDIT: maybe you have been gone as long as I - next time I will check the post dates.