Is Avalon mining with customer hardware? Answer is here.

[Rampion]

Until there are companies that can deliver existing inventory at the drop of a hat, there is nothing to hold these ASIC companies honest.
At least ASICMiner is up front about it.  

ASICMiner is such a company. You get your order delivered within a few days.

Yes, for an amount of BTC that you will never ever mine back.

[coinedBit]

I doodle with different ideas of how I might change the design.
Some options that came to mind are:
1.  A GPS unit that sends it's location to a well known database.
2.  IPv6 with a MAC based address that puts it's identity into a well known ntp servers logs.
3.  A "power on" log across the AC power, similar to what lots of high end lab equiptment has.

Agreed, it wouldn't even be particularly difficult to have a "hard-coded" serial number and encode it as part of transactions, including successful mining (so that the complete history of a hardware node would become transparent) - but it isn't really in the interest of vendors obviously, just think about how pissed customers are going to be if they were to learn that their hardware had been running for a couple of weeks and was responsible for >= $1M USD profits at a time when difficulty was comparatively low.

[tinus42]

Until there are companies that can deliver existing inventory at the drop of a hat, there is nothing to hold these ASIC companies honest.
At least ASICMiner is up front about it.  

ASICMiner is such a company. You get your order delivered within a few days.

Yes, for an amount of BTC that you will never ever mine back.

You didn't mention them being affordable.

The high prices are a direct result of them having no competition who can deliver quickly. They can set the price as high as the market is willing to accept.

[Loredo]

Vendor:  This device will make all the money you can ever spend.
Bitcoiner:  I need two.

Lunch time in the US Mountain time zone.  Out.

[ProfMac]

I doodle with different ideas of how I might change the design.
Some options that came to mind are:
1.  A GPS unit that sends it's location to a well known database.
2.  IPv6 with a MAC based address that puts it's identity into a well known ntp servers logs.
3.  A "power on" log across the AC power, similar to what lots of high end lab equiptment has.

Agreed, it wouldn't even be particularly difficult to have a "hard-coded" serial number and encode it as part of transactions, including successful mining (so that the complete history of a hardware node would become transparent) - but it isn't really in the interest of vendors obviously, just think about how pissed customers are going to be if they were to learn that their hardware had been running for a couple of weeks and was responsible for >= $1M USD profits at a time when difficulty was comparatively low.

The MAC address in the TP-Link 703n router is a hard coded serial number that is already in place.  It can be published very easily.

I think a vendor that supplies this level of transparency will attract quality customers, so I think it is in their interest.  

[Loredo]

You didn't mention them being affordable.

The high prices are a direct result of them having no competition who can deliver quickly. They can set the price as high as the market is willing to accept.

Until somebody comes along who understands what a demand curve looks like in a bubble (as formed by greedy geniuses), and also understands the concept of pricing to sell all the way down to where marginal cost = marginal revenue.  And when the risk is sufficiently controllable (or controlled) they will come.

[Loredo]

The MAC address in the TP-Link 703n router is a hard coded serial number that is already in place.  It can be published very easily.

I suspect you are someone who knows the real answer to this:  is not any MAC spoof-able at the firewall level?  Or is it that at the router, it would actually have to entail firmware hacks that would be virtually impossible?

[coinedBit]

MAC spoofing is a fairly common thing, even without having access to the hardware, like you said.
Transparency would be a good thing, and I do agree that a company providing such a degree of transparency could attract quite a number of potential clients

[infested999]

The MAC address in the TP-Link 703n router is a hard coded serial number that is already in place.  It can be published very easily.

I suspect you are someone who knows the real answer to this:  is not any MAC spoof-able at the firewall level?  Or is it that at the router, it would actually have to entail firmware hacks that would be virtually impossible?

They could always use a ethernet-relay in between that will spoof the MAC

[ProfMac]

The MAC address in the TP-Link 703n router is a hard coded serial number that is already in place.  It can be published very easily.

I suspect you are someone who knows the real answer to this:  is not any MAC spoof-able at the firewall level?  Or is it that at the router, it would actually have to entail firmware hacks that would be virtually impossible?

To narrow the question down to OpenWRT, which is the router software running on the Avalon, I believe, but have not verified, that the MAC can be spoofed.  I think this is a standard feature of any commercial "router" today.

In a larger scope, I run lots of software inside a virtual machine.  Those MACs can be easily spoofed.  One of my VMs has completely cloned the original hardware environment, including the MAC addresses on the original hardware box.

The Cisco and Linksys routers can spoof the MAC address of a LAN side computer.

[01BTC10]

The MAC address in the TP-Link 703n router is a hard coded serial number that is already in place.  It can be published very easily.

I suspect you are someone who knows the real answer to this:  is not any MAC spoof-able at the firewall level?  Or is it that at the router, it would actually have to entail firmware hacks that would be virtually impossible?

To narrow the question down to OpenWRT, which is the router software running on the Avalon, I believe, but have not verified, that the MAC can be spoofed.  I think this is a standard feature of any commercial "router" today.

In a larger scope, I run lots of software inside a virtual machine.  Those MACs can be easily spoofed.  One of my VMs has completely cloned the original hardware environment, including the MAC addresses on the original hardware box.

The Cisco and Linksys routers can spoof the MAC address of a LAN side computer.

Very easy to spoof a MAC.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/man1/macchanger.1.html

[Loredo]

To narrow the question down to OpenWRT, which is the router software running on the Avalon, I believe, but have not verified, that the MAC can be spoofed.  

So, then, when you say "The MAC address in the TP-Link 703n router is a hard coded serial number that is already in place", that doesn't necessarily imply there might be some way to establish identity of a router instance unambiguously?

[Loredo]

Very easy to spoof a MAC.

Oh, I know.  I'm coming to you over a spoofed MAC right now.

EDIT:  Not because I'm Evil Hacker.  It just makes it a bit harder for the boys at GOOG to keep up with the ad campaigns they have in mind for me.

[dropt]

Until there are companies that can deliver existing inventory at the drop of a hat, there is nothing to hold these ASIC companies honest.
At least ASICMiner is up front about it.  

ASICMiner is such a company. You get your order delivered within a few days.

Yes, for an amount of BTC that you will never ever mine back.

AM Didn't set that price, the greedy free market did during AM's initial blade auctions.

[Loredo]

AM Didn't set that price, the greedy free market did during AM's initial blade auctions.

That's right.  But, as a guy named Edward Miller described way back in 1970's in Journal of Finance, when nobody knows what something is worth, it is the optimists who set the price. 

The median consensus, which is where a real business needs to tap into to really make money, is somewhere below that.  That's why there's a gap in the market that's going to fill, IMO.

[k9quaint]

Until there are companies that can deliver existing inventory at the drop of a hat, there is nothing to hold these ASIC companies honest.
At least ASICMiner is up front about it.  

ASICMiner is such a company. You get your order delivered within a few days.

I thought that the Eruptor Blade sale was a one time offer of a fixed number of blades. It sold out, and now ASICMiner is not offering more blades yet.
The USB sticks are gimmicks that don't really add much to the hash rate (and are horribly overpriced).

[ProfMac]

To narrow the question down to OpenWRT, which is the router software running on the Avalon, I believe, but have not verified, that the MAC can be spoofed.  

So, then, when you say "The MAC address in the TP-Link 703n router is a hard coded serial number that is already in place", that doesn't necessarily imply there might be some way to establish identity of a router instance unambiguously?

You can forge (spoof) an identity.
You can use the existing MAC as a serial number to identify a specific router.

You can forge a driver's license.
You can use a driver's license to establish identity.

[Hippie Tech]

I was onto it in February, when they first began to surface.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137534.msg1548544#msg1548544

3 months later, AvenG confirmed my suspicions with this post.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137534.msg2176000#msg2176000

The conspiracy to centralize or shut down Bitcoin is plainly evident to me now.

The asic promises and gpu sell off of 2012.. The gpu diverting alt-coin craze.. I wonder what phase 3 has in store ?

[one4many]

To narrow the question down to OpenWRT, which is the router software running on the Avalon, I believe, but have not verified, that the MAC can be spoofed.  

So, then, when you say "The MAC address in the TP-Link 703n router is a hard coded serial number that is already in place", that doesn't necessarily imply there might be some way to establish identity of a router instance unambiguously?

You can forge (spoof) an identity.
You can use the existing MAC as a serial number to identify a specific router.

You can forge a driver's license.
You can use a driver's license to establish identity.

Why should the MAC address from some device in the network matter at all? The MAC address reaches as far as the first router (normally your default gateway), 1 hop beyond that it is not only totally irrelevant for getting TCP/IP packets from A to B, but also UNKOWN!!
So what do want to prove with MAC addresses here? MAC addresses are on layer 2 (in the ISO/OSI layer model) and TCP/IP is on layer 3 and 4 ...
The higher layers don't know anything about the layer below them.

MAC addresses prove nothing expect when you are connected to the same PHYSICAL SWITCH or ROUTER where the device with the MAC address in question as also connected.
I highly doubt that you PC/Laptop/Mac at home shares the same physical network with any odd Avalon Box in Testing somewhere in China.

[coinedBit]

MAC addresses were probably brought up because "some" OS actually used them to come up with hardware-specific keys for registering your product, to be eligible for free upgrades. I think they used a combination of hardware-specific serials and mixed everything up to ensure that Windows installations would not be prone to double-spending