ASIC testing on main net is wrong, PERIOD.

[crazyates]

um I like bad analogies - someone raised cars before
so if my car manufacturer is testing my new car I would prefer he tested it on a test track before it went onto public roads (I know no-one will get killed if an asics brakes fail - but hopefully you get my drift )

I worked at a car dealership several years ago - and while I have no doubt that the manufacturer tested a few sample models on a test track, not every single car manufactured was run through a test track run. However, almost every single car WAS tested (by the dealership) on public roads, before it was sold to the customer. We would slap some special dealer plates on the car, and go for a carefully chosen 8 mile loop, one that included hills, flats, stop lights, highway stretches, etc. At the end, we'd fill up the gas tank, and return. Yes, these were cars directly off the trucks, and had not gone through a State Inspection yet.

[Graet]

i certainly hope there will be some testing on mainnet. i don't want to get a product from any company, if it hasn't been proven on real live pools.

how will pools respond to some much additional hashing power? will a sustained 10-20x increasing in hashing power have an adverse effect on pools? i don't want to see pools going down after ASICs come out.

will the product work with stratum? how about getblocktemplate?

i think it's unreasonable to think/ask that that no testing occurs on main net. bfl, btcfga, and avalon should all have engineers/developers performing functional and stress testing on REAL world mining scenarios before they send their products out to customers. i sure as hell don't want to get an ASIC miner only to find out that there is a critical bug that cripples my ability to mine...

i don't know how big each company's development team is , but I'd say it'd be reasonable to have maybe 3-5 of their test machines running on main net during development. of course, once they've finalized their development and testing, there is little need to keep those machines attached to main net. then before shipping, customer machines can be "burned-in" on a test net .

this would more be an issues for pools and mining sofware devs to address - not the manufacturers of ASIC - in fact I am expecting some of the less well maintained pools to fall over when someone tries to mine on them with ASIC.
stratum and GBT were developed specifically because of the expected extra loads from currently FPGA minirigs and upcoming ASIC hardware on pools.

one ASIC manufacturer is sending software devs devices to code on so there is actually working software when his product gets delivered.
I'm sure pool operators would be happy to be sent devices to test against the pools before release too All we have to work with is "there are lots of high hashrate machines coming - no real specs yet - but get ready".
I am also sure mining software devs will test against prepared pools - as ckolivas is with slush's pool and btcguild as he develops stratum support for cgminer. This makes sense. not so much manufacturers who can indeed do burn on testing on testnet.

[SolarSilver]

Whatever they mine WE never get a chance at, EVER.

Unless they turn over the mined BTC to the customer by using an online wallet, a customer supplied BTC address of choice or a printed wallet in the shipment. Heck, even a branded USB stick with the wallet.dat on it could do...

Frankly I consider machines running for a burn-in of 24h in a test net a pure waste of electricity and an environmental cost we can live without.

[DobZombie]

If Butterfly labs were to be using the rigs to mine, would we assume that they would mine on EclipseMC? Thinking against that, their total hashrate hasn't really changed since ozcoin sent a lot of their miners to Eclipse (it went from 1.3TH/s to 1.8TH/s)

Or then again, if BSL_josh/Inuba was smart, he's figure a way around it like...

*using another pool
*Mine on his own
*change the sites programming to not reflect test rigs.

I did happen the see Inuba was mining at 550GH/s a few weeks ago, does he have a mining farm that big?

hmmm

Conspiracy theorists, DISCUSS!

0.o

[crazyates]

I did happen the see Inuba was mining at 550GH/s a few weeks ago, does he have a mining farm that big?

IIRC, he's hosting (aka controlling) a bunch of people's FPGA Single and MRs, while they're waiting for the trade in program. He pays them their BTC, minus a cut to host and power them, but he can control where they mine at.

[salfter]

...and it looks like BFL has committed to not test on mainnet:

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/showthread.php/52-ASIC-Pre-Shipment-Testing-Policy

We are often asked what our official policy is towards testing the ASIC equipment prior to shipping it to customers.

Our official policy is that we will burn in/test your equipment for a minimum of 24 hours on what is called "Testnet-in-a-box." This will allow us to verify that you equipment is working and able to sustain operations at normal operating conditions for a minimum of 24 hours.

Further down, there's something about testnet-in-a-box somehow not being fully up to the task of testing a TH/s-class device (bitcoind can't handle the throughput), but that they'd figure something out.  Given that the 20 or so people who've ordered Mini Rigs could potentially have such a device banging away at their bitcoind instances when they arrive, what exactly does this mean for them?

[legolouman]

...and it looks like BFL has committed to not test on mainnet:

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/showthread.php/52-ASIC-Pre-Shipment-Testing-Policy

We are often asked what our official policy is towards testing the ASIC equipment prior to shipping it to customers.

Our official policy is that we will burn in/test your equipment for a minimum of 24 hours on what is called "Testnet-in-a-box." This will allow us to verify that you equipment is working and able to sustain operations at normal operating conditions for a minimum of 24 hours.

Further down, there's something about testnet-in-a-box somehow not being fully up to the task of testing a TH/s-class device (bitcoind can't handle the throughput), but that they'd figure something out.  Given that the 20 or so people who've ordered Mini Rigs could potentially have such a device banging away at their bitcoind instances when they arrive, what exactly does this mean for them?

They contradicted themselves?

[jjshabadoo]

This is great to hear and kudos to BFL.

They take a lot of S on here, but they deserve credit on a very ethical decision in my opinion.

Sounds like the hardware folks are in unison on this which is great for the community.

[crazyates]

...and it looks like BFL has committed to not test on mainnet:

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/showthread.php/52-ASIC-Pre-Shipment-Testing-Policy

We are often asked what our official policy is towards testing the ASIC equipment prior to shipping it to customers.

Our official policy is that we will burn in/test your equipment for a minimum of 24 hours on what is called "Testnet-in-a-box." This will allow us to verify that you equipment is working and able to sustain operations at normal operating conditions for a minimum of 24 hours.

Further down, there's something about testnet-in-a-box somehow not being fully up to the task of testing a TH/s-class device (bitcoind can't handle the throughput), but that they'd figure something out.  Given that the 20 or so people who've ordered Mini Rigs could potentially have such a device banging away at their bitcoind instances when they arrive, what exactly does this mean for them?

They contradicted themselves?

IIRC, they never actually said they would mine on the main-net. They never actually said they would be using a test-net, either, at least before that 2012/10/2 post.

[Bogart]

Here's Avalon-ASIC's statement:

who mentioned we are testing on main net? We are not.
I'd like to clarify however, during December chip demonstration, it will be on main net, and several well known pools, we shall reveal exactly how much hashing power and when, this will be public knowledge.

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/10vmxa/avalon_asic_ama/c6h2pu2

[scrybe]

um I like bad analogies - someone raised cars before
so if my car manufacturer is testing my new car I would prefer he tested it on a test track before it went onto public roads (I know no-one will get killed if an asics brakes fail - but hopefully you get my drift )

I worked at a car dealership several years ago - and while I have no doubt that the manufacturer tested a few sample models on a test track, not every single car manufactured was run through a test track run. However, almost every single car WAS tested (by the dealership) on public roads, before it was sold to the customer. We would slap some special dealer plates on the car, and go for a carefully chosen 8 mile loop, one that included hills, flats, stop lights, highway stretches, etc. At the end, we'd fill up the gas tank, and return. Yes, these were cars directly off the trucks, and had not gone through a State Inspection yet.

Your example is actually pretty close to a test track. It might be on public roads, but it was a pre-determined route used by the dealership to determine if there are issues that need correcting. This is like regular TestNet and a closed track is like TestNet-in-a-Box. Unfortunately the public TestNet track is populated mostly with by the State Steam Powered Auto club (developers), and are far more concerned with making sure that every little part of the track is known so they can test very precise details in their contraptions (test code build/hardware.) They can get all pissy if we bring in our dragsters and make a lot of noise and tear up their track, so they have built us our own Private Track called TestNet-in-a-Box.

So we have TestNet-in-a-Box where we can take the minirig-sc, give it the beans, and make sure the wheels stay on.

Testing on MainNet is more like the dealer letting all his employees USE the new cars for a week instead of their own, and every car he sold as "NEW!" was actually used for the carpool (or hauling home drunks) for a week.

[crazyates]

um I like bad analogies - someone raised cars before
so if my car manufacturer is testing my new car I would prefer he tested it on a test track before it went onto public roads (I know no-one will get killed if an asics brakes fail - but hopefully you get my drift )

I worked at a car dealership several years ago - and while I have no doubt that the manufacturer tested a few sample models on a test track, not every single car manufactured was run through a test track run. However, almost every single car WAS tested (by the dealership) on public roads, before it was sold to the customer. We would slap some special dealer plates on the car, and go for a carefully chosen 8 mile loop, one that included hills, flats, stop lights, highway stretches, etc. At the end, we'd fill up the gas tank, and return. Yes, these were cars directly off the trucks, and had not gone through a State Inspection yet.

Your example is actually pretty close to a test track. It might be on public roads, but it was a pre-determined route used by the dealership to determine if there are issues that need correcting. This is like regular TestNet and a closed track is like TestNet-in-a-Box. Unfortunately the public TestNet track is populated mostly with by the State Steam Powered Auto club (developers), and are far more concerned with making sure that every little part of the track is known so they can test very precise details in their contraptions (test code build/hardware.) They can get all pissy if we bring in our dragsters and make a lot of noise and tear up their track, so they have built us our own Private Track called TestNet-in-a-Box.

So we have TestNet-in-a-Box where we can take the minirig-sc, give it the beans, and make sure the wheels stay on.

Testing on MainNet is more like the dealer letting all his employees USE the new cars for a week instead of their own, and every car he sold as "NEW!" was actually used for the carpool (or hauling home drunks) for a week.

2 thinks:

1st, we're talking about a road test on PUBLIC roads. As in driving on the highway in a dealer car, right next to dozens of other cars that have been bought by customers. In our analogy, public roads are the main-net. Test tracks are the test-net. How are you saying that driving an untested car on public roads not like mining an untested miner on the main-net? This is assuming the design has been proven solid, but that specific unit has not.

2nd, car dealerships totally loan out dealer cars for employee use. Not every employee gets one, but 6 out of the 20 employees at the dealership were given dealership cars for their personal use. They would drive them for a few weeks to a month or two, get a new one, and then sell the one they were driving. The goal was to "become familiar with all the cars on our lot", but that's not the REAL reason they did it. Anyways, I don't know how this helps our analogy, but whatevs.

[Isokivi]

Replying to agree with op and to bump the thread.. this should be a huge shitstorm.

[jjshabadoo]

In my opinion, if there were no pre-orders, then fine.

I still wouldn't like the idea of a company competing with me, but hey, they didn't take my money upfront. They could decide not to sell the product at all if they choose.

Now once you take FULL payment upfront, I own that product unless you refund my money.

I don't get why people don't understand that pre-payment = contract.

I still applaud ALL vendors who have stated they will only use testnet in a box.

Any other vendor who took full payment pre-order should be held to the same standard.

If not, informed consumers should make the right choice.

People always bring up "free market", well free markets are an epic FAIL without informed consumers.

[crazyates]

this should be a huge shitstorm.

Why? I know of no mining ASIC manufacturer that has said they will mine on the main-net.

[Borzoi]

FPGA conversion to ASIC (by yourself or by vendor) is not too expensive if you have research or student access.  Is cost more than GPU card and less yield than full custom run, but you can work with fab scheduling companies to put chips on margin of wafer already being processed.  Simpler is better, because charge by mm^2 and layers.

I have done for other purposes in grad school and am looking into bitcoin ASIC for fun.  I probably go for many simple hasher chips than many core, so is not commercially viable.  Simple chip to wire wrap, too.  My estimates are less $100 chip, packaged, for 50-100 chips.  Could be more, is always case.

I plan to test on main net.    You must fear my 50 times .5 gigahashes per second in lunchbox.

[Borzoi]

Is you be joking happy time?  Wire-wrap and ASIC.  I would think you would at least have access to a reflow oven.

If you're not joking, I'd like to hear more.  At least I know you can do math.

I joke about wire wrap, of course.  I am not sure about your first sentence, but I take feeling you are teasing my about my English.  Look down for explanation in signature.

I am serious but fun for mining chip.  I have many old FPGA developer kits and have been creating small footprint unrolled bitcoin miners as hobby.  Performance is bad alone but together, I can make all worth two dollars per hour spent on hobby.  I breaking even after 30 million bitcoins are found.  Mathematics makes proof !

[legolouman]

Many pools are beginning to offer a higher difficulty share. Instead of giving all of the miners difficulty 1 shares, the pool assigns anywhere from 4 - 32 or even HIGHER difficulty. The only difference is the speed the share is completed and the amount of bandwidth used, as both 100 difficulty 1 shares is the same as 1 difficulty 100 share.

The speed the share is completed in will be negligible in terms of variance on large ASIC rigs.

[jayeeyee]

HOLY CRAP.  Whichever ASIC company is doing this.. is earning a shizzload of BTC right now.  This is so wrong on so many levels.. but can our opinion really change their minds?  I think not.

[Turbor]