Whose ASIC will start hashing first?

[niko]

Who will be hashing first, not shipping first. BFL has announced they will be "burning in" their product, and I am not sure what they will do with the profits. Bitfountain plans to mine first until the initial investment has been recovered, and only sell afterwards.

[dust]

Didn't Artforz do a small run of ASICs a long time ago?

ArtForz has developed sha256 ASICs and let them (100 pieces) manufacturing for about $500/engine. This ASICs beats 5970 on hash/W by a factor of 6 but loses to 5970 on hash/$ by about a factor of 3, he said. These ASICs are not exactly a real standard cell ASIC but "metal-layer defined ASIC, basically FPGA without the FP part" (source: #bitcoin-dev).

What kind of ASIC is it?  Is this a custom PCI card?  Would higher production volumes improve the price point?  I'm interested in this, as a purpose made PCI card would be as big a boon as buying an expensive GPU.

ArtForz expect the arrive in february:
https://stuff.caurea.org/irssi/freenode/%23bitcoin-dev/2010/12/%23bitcoin-dev-2010-12-20.log : 18:36

Maybe the first step to develop a ASIC is this vhdl code. I don't believe that ArtForz will give us his code. If we put money together, maybe we could have enough money to let manufacturing a real ASIC.

[niko]

What are people who vote "ASICs are already hashing" thinking? The network hash rate has not skyrocketed - it follows the price as usual, indicating no change in technology.

[runeks]

What are people who vote "ASICs are already hashing" thinking? The network hash rate has not skyrocketed - it follows the price as usual, indicating no change in technology.

Bitcoincharts.com estimates the next difficulty to be 3071917 (with 471 blocks left). If this happens it will be a 7.3% increase in network hash rate. Where would that extra hashing power come from? I think ASIC burn-in is a good bet.

[Korbman]

What are people who vote "ASICs are already hashing" thinking? The network hash rate has not skyrocketed - it follows the price as usual, indicating no change in technology.

Bitcoincharts.com estimates the next difficulty to be 3071917 (with 471 blocks left). If this happens it will be a 7.3% increase in network hash rate. Where would that extra hashing power come from? I think ASIC burn-in is a good bet.

Probably a pretty good assumption since BFL is coming up on their release date. I'm sure there could be other ASIC companies looking to test their chips as well for releases within the next 6 months.

[niko]

What are people who vote "ASICs are already hashing" thinking? The network hash rate has not skyrocketed - it follows the price as usual, indicating no change in technology.

Bitcoincharts.com estimates the next difficulty to be 3071917 (with 471 blocks left). If this happens it will be a 7.3% increase in network hash rate. Where would that extra hashing power come from? I think ASIC burn-in is a good bet.

No need for estimates when we have actual data. If ASICs are hashing today and were hashing yesterday, wouldn't there be a distinct surge in hash rates? Do you see such a surge in sipa's graphs? I don't.

[squid]

Im pretty sure if BFL had a product to show they would show it to quench the multitude of people calling bs on their release date.

[Korbman]

Im pretty sure if BFL had a product to show they would show it to quench the multitude of people calling bs on their release date.

Definitely. BFL is in it for the long con, scamming us of millions of USD and BTCs by establishing a legitimate business and pretending to sell mining hardware. [/sarcasm]

Really squid? Really? I suppose obvious troll is obvious... 

[runeks]

What are people who vote "ASICs are already hashing" thinking? The network hash rate has not skyrocketed - it follows the price as usual, indicating no change in technology.

Bitcoincharts.com estimates the next difficulty to be 3071917 (with 471 blocks left). If this happens it will be a 7.3% increase in network hash rate. Where would that extra hashing power come from? I think ASIC burn-in is a good bet.

No need for estimates when we have actual data. If ASICs are hashing today and were hashing yesterday, wouldn't there be a distinct surge in hash rates? Do you see such a surge in sipa's graphs? I don't.

Well we don't have actual data for the past week and a half. We deduce hash rate from difficulty. And difficulty was last adjusted 9 days ago.

[CJGoodings]

You bfl fan-bois would hate to hear what artforz has to say about them.

[Korbman]

Well we don't have actual data for the past week and a half. We deduce hash rate from difficulty. And difficulty was last adjusted 9 days ago.

And will be adjusted again in the next 3 days or so.

[squid]

Im pretty sure if BFL had a product to show they would show it to quench the multitude of people calling bs on their release date.

Definitely. BFL is in it for the long con, scamming us of millions of USD and BTCs by establishing a legitimate business and pretending to sell mining hardware. [/sarcasm]

Really squid? Really? I suppose obvious troll is obvious... 

I wasn't saying BFL was a con. I am just saying that their release date is too optimistic and predict a more reasonable Q1 2013 release. Don't get your panties in a bunch damn man.

[Korbman]

I wasn't saying BFL was a con. I am just saying that their release date is too optimistic and predict a more reasonable Q1 2013 release. Don't get your panties in a bunch damn man.

I suppose that's pretty reasonable given they've pushed back from an October "release" to November. I admit I'm a bit tired of the cynical views though. People don't seem to understand how typical business operations run, nor do they understand online business laws. If customers would have known the FTC would have gotten involved with BFL's business operations during the fiasco with the FPGA devices, then I'm sure they would have.

And I love getting my granny panties all bunched up! 

[niko]

What are people who vote "ASICs are already hashing" thinking? The network hash rate has not skyrocketed - it follows the price as usual, indicating no change in technology.

Bitcoincharts.com estimates the next difficulty to be 3071917 (with 471 blocks left). If this happens it will be a 7.3% increase in network hash rate. Where would that extra hashing power come from? I think ASIC burn-in is a good bet.

No need for estimates when we have actual data. If ASICs are hashing today and were hashing yesterday, wouldn't there be a distinct surge in hash rates? Do you see such a surge in sipa's graphs? I don't.

Well we don't have actual data for the past week and a half. We deduce hash rate from difficulty. And difficulty was last adjusted 9 days ago.

Try again. We do have actual data: number of blocks mined per unit time. We don't deduce hash rate from difficulty, we deduce difficulty from hash rate (again, based on the number of blocks mined per unit time).

Every 2016 blocks (which should take two weeks if this goal is kept perfectly), every Bitcoin client compares the actual time it took to generate these blocks with the two week goal and modifies the target by the percentage difference. This makes the proof-of-work problem more or less difficult. A single retarget never changes the target by more than a factor of 4 either way to prevent large changes in difficulty.

[runeks]

What are people who vote "ASICs are already hashing" thinking? The network hash rate has not skyrocketed - it follows the price as usual, indicating no change in technology.

Bitcoincharts.com estimates the next difficulty to be 3071917 (with 471 blocks left). If this happens it will be a 7.3% increase in network hash rate. Where would that extra hashing power come from? I think ASIC burn-in is a good bet.

No need for estimates when we have actual data. If ASICs are hashing today and were hashing yesterday, wouldn't there be a distinct surge in hash rates? Do you see such a surge in sipa's graphs? I don't.

Well we don't have actual data for the past week and a half. We deduce hash rate from difficulty. And difficulty was last adjusted 9 days ago.

Try again. We do have actual data: number of blocks mined per unit time. We don't deduce hash rate from difficulty, we deduce difficulty from hash rate (again, based on the number of blocks mined per unit time).

Every 2016 blocks (which should take two weeks if this goal is kept perfectly), every Bitcoin client compares the actual time it took to generate these blocks with the two week goal and modifies the target by the percentage difference. This makes the proof-of-work problem more or less difficult. A single retarget never changes the target by more than a factor of 4 either way to prevent large changes in difficulty.

You are right. But I do think we're seeing a surge in hash rate. Blocks are coming in at around 7 per hour currently (according to bitcoincharts).

[niko]

What are people who vote "ASICs are already hashing" thinking? The network hash rate has not skyrocketed - it follows the price as usual, indicating no change in technology.

Bitcoincharts.com estimates the next difficulty to be 3071917 (with 471 blocks left). If this happens it will be a 7.3% increase in network hash rate. Where would that extra hashing power come from? I think ASIC burn-in is a good bet.

No need for estimates when we have actual data. If ASICs are hashing today and were hashing yesterday, wouldn't there be a distinct surge in hash rates? Do you see such a surge in sipa's graphs? I don't.

Well we don't have actual data for the past week and a half. We deduce hash rate from difficulty. And difficulty was last adjusted 9 days ago.

Try again. We do have actual data: number of blocks mined per unit time. We don't deduce hash rate from difficulty, we deduce difficulty from hash rate (again, based on the number of blocks mined per unit time).

Every 2016 blocks (which should take two weeks if this goal is kept perfectly), every Bitcoin client compares the actual time it took to generate these blocks with the two week goal and modifies the target by the percentage difference. This makes the proof-of-work problem more or less difficult. A single retarget never changes the target by more than a factor of 4 either way to prevent large changes in difficulty.

You are right. But I do think we're seeing a surge in hash rate. Blocks are coming in at around 7 per hour currently (according to bitcoincharts).

Variation. Go to bitcoin.sipa.be and have a look. Here is a relevant snapshot:

Clearly, the increase over the past month or so is about 1000 Gh/s per week. This would be less than one minirig sc (1500 Gh/s) coming online per week. Besides, we have seen comparable rate of increase whenever the exchange rate goes up.

[niko]

Thanks to all who voted. I am still surprised that so many people think ASICs have been hashing for a while. Other than that, the results are expected, and I bet they reflect the pre-order market share to some extent - wishful thinking.

[GenTarkin]

My ASIC will mine first, duh...

[crazy_rabbit]

I think it's a near certainty that someones ASICs are already up and hashing, if only in a testing capacity.

[Nachtwind]

Mothlab's vASICs are hashing already ,0)