a theoretical question about asic-development

[r0sc0e]

Dear community,

a friend of mine is an ASIC designer and I'd like to ask him to build a Bitcoin miner or to make an offer for the desisn.

My problem is, that I don't have the theoretical background to tell him, what I need. I know the wikipedia-articles about Bitcoin, ASICs or SHA-256 but I'm not an expert at these things. That's why I need some technical background which I could show to the designer.

I cannot send him just the satoshi-docs. I have to give him some specific information.

It would be nice if you could help me!

Greetings,


r0sc0e

[Rampion]

Dear community,

a friend of mine is an ASIC designer and I'd like to ask him to build a Bitcoin miner or to make an offer for the desisn.

My problem is, that I don't have the theoretical background to tell him, what I need. I know the wikipedia-articles about Bitcoin, ASICs or SHA-256 but I'm not an expert at these things. That's why I need some technical background which I could show to the designer.

I cannot send him just the satoshi-docs. I have to give him some specific information.

It would be nice if you could help me!

Greetings,


r0sc0e

Do you want to be spoonfed? No one on these forums will tell you "what you have to tell him" for him to design a Bitcoin ASIC. He needs to read about Bitcoin to understand it, he needs to know about the cryptography in which Bitcoin is based, he needs to learn what bitcoin mining is, and then he may know where to start.

[wrenchmonkey]

Dear community,

a friend of mine is an ASIC designer and I'd like to ask him to build a Bitcoin miner or to make an offer for the desisn.

My problem is, that I don't have the theoretical background to tell him, what I need. I know the wikipedia-articles about Bitcoin, ASICs or SHA-256 but I'm not an expert at these things. That's why I need some technical background which I could show to the designer.

I cannot send him just the satoshi-docs. I have to give him some specific information.

It would be nice if you could help me!

Greetings,


r0sc0e

This sounds like a wonderful offer, except for the part where you don't offer to pay people, or offer a share in your company...

You are basically requesting that somebody spoon-feed you a technical data package for you to get rich off of, without offering anything in return. Come up with a solid plan, offer some sort of compensation, be it in the form of prospective profit shares, payment upfront, trade, barter, what have you.

No free lunch. Especially not with the amount of information you're demanding.

If you come up with a solid viable business plan, you should have no problem sourcing a team of developers who can help you accomplish what you need.

Is your friend doing the chip design on spec, as a favor, in barter, for cash? How are you going to pay for a production order for these chips? Getting a forge to tool up for production requires a great deal of capital outlay. Where's the money coming from? Forges don't work on spec.

You seem to be putting the cart before the horse here.

[Red_Evil]

ASK BFL

[r0sc0e]

I read the threads in the board, where via groupby people want to get some avalon-chips.
Right now i only know Avalon selling asics for mining. In my opinion BFL is a big scam.

it would be nice, if someone ( perhaps me? ) can organize a design for the asic and the community can take profit of it. If the design could be done, i could take some money from myself to make the first production of the chip.

I like the idea of a decentralized currency. my intention is not to get rich of it, perhaps, if it works, and the chip could be produced, it would be nice to get some money for my work.

my intention is that everyone can get a more powerfull miner ( more powerfull than gpu-mining ) for middle-budget.

i know that sounds not real, but it is my true intention.

[DannyHamilton]

At the most basic level:

A block of data would be presented with some predefined modifiable bytes.
There would be some predefined specifications as to the allowable ranges of values for those modifiable bytes.
All other bytes are to be considered immutable.

Optimally in parallel, the ASIC would compute a double SHA-256 hash over every allowable variation of the of the block of data.

The output would be the particular variation of modifiable bytes that result in the lowest hash value.

For a good starting point on the specifics of the SHA-256 hash protocol, see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha-256

For a good starting point on the modifiable bytes of the presented block of data see the structure of the block header here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm

Note, it is the Nonce and Time fields that are modifiable when attempting to solve the hash for a particular block.

[wrenchmonkey]

I read the threads in the board, where via groupby people want to get some avalon-chips.
Right now i only know Avalon selling asics for mining. In my opinion BFL is a big scam.

it would be nice, if someone ( perhaps me? ) can organize a design for the asic and the community can take profit of it. If the design could be done, i could take some money from myself to make the first production of the chip.

I like the idea of a decentralized currency. my intention is not to get rich of it, perhaps, if it works, and the chip could be produced, it would be nice to get some money for my work.

my intention is that everyone can get a more powerfull miner ( more powerfull than gpu-mining ) for middle-budget.

i know that sounds not real, but it is my true intention.

Very well, but these are details to make public with your request. It's going to be open-source? That's worth mentioning. People are far more likely to invest the time and effort to share information with you, if you make it known that the results will be made available for the benefit of all.

But to put things in perspective, those chip orders that are being done right now are $100,000ish in real dollars. Not really certain what the actual cost is direct from a forge, but even if you assume it's half that, you're looking at $50k to do a run. I don't know your background, but most people don't have $50k sitting in a bank account.

I'm not saying that you can't do this, but you need to do a lot more planning on the logistics and funding side, before you start worrying about the technical details of how the chip will operate. An open-source chip design would truly revolutionize the industry though. You might consider doing a "kickstarter" project, or something similar to get it up and going. I would be interested in supporting something like that with my meager funding I have available (I have nothing to offer on the technical side).

[r0sc0e]

perhaps the first steps and the finance-part for the first production could be done with some support of the community.
But i do not ask therefor here right now. About 50k dollars could be invested from some "friends" of my idea, who i talked to in the last days.

i spend about 2 hours daily to get the right contacts to production-companys in europe, with productionlines in asia.

but i have no experience to make such a big projekt like an open-source asic.

therefore i can need some help.

perhaps if someone wants to support my idea, on anyway, please contact me.

i have nothing to loose.. no money is invested right now, but perhaps the dream of an opensource-asic come true :-)


r0sc0e

[Walter Rothbard]

Dear community,

a friend of mine is an ASIC designer and I'd like to ask him to build a Bitcoin miner or to make an offer for the desisn.

My problem is, that I don't have the theoretical background to tell him, what I need. I know the wikipedia-articles about Bitcoin, ASICs or SHA-256 but I'm not an expert at these things. That's why I need some technical background which I could show to the designer.

I cannot send him just the satoshi-docs. I have to give him some specific information.

It would be nice if you could help me!

Greetings,


r0sc0e

If he's an ASIC designer and the two of you can't figure it out from the above bolded documentation and need help beyond that, I don't think the two of you are qualified for this project.

I'm not an expert at these things

You need to become an expert, and I don't think you'll do it by asking this sort of question on the forum.

For starters, read through the Satoshi source code.