[ActiveMining] The Official Active Mining Discussion Thread [Self-Moderated]

[finlof]

the information Ken has let out on chip timelines is fantastical.

The only fantastical statements are being made by you right now. You ignored the complete annihilation of your last piece of FUD but now you continue.

Ignored.

minerpart - this is one reason why I (and several others) think you need to step back.  you lose any shred of credibility when you try to argue with an expert.

[MrTeal]

The type of Data Center I use and am responsible for is not a rental space. It is for my company, exclusively. We do use one about 40 miles away that does have rackspace for rent that could absolutely absorb 2MW (they're currently expanding into a one million square foot renovation). Off the top of my head the one "room" (it's more like a hallway with hallways off of it) we have at the commercial space holds ten rows with 9 racks per row so that's 90 racks in one "room" if you're using both sides of the area.

 
Wow, a 1 million square foot DC is an absolutely huge facility. I might be out of date, but that would have been one of the largest in the world just a couple years ago. That's going to be a multi-billion dollar renovation. I'm sure a facility like that could definitely squeeze in an extra couple MW without batting an eye.

[mainline]

the information Ken has let out on chip timelines is fantastical.

The only fantastical statements are being made by you right now. You ignored the complete annihilation of your last piece of FUD but now you continue.

Ignored.

minerpart - this is one reason why I (and several others) think you need to step back.  you lose any shred of credibility when you try to argue with an expert.

minerpart ignores MrTeal.  Kids nowadays...

[minerpart]

minerpart - this is one reason why I (and several others) think you need to step back.  you lose any shred of credibility when you try to argue with an expert.

I showed his statement which made the 1-2 PH plan look void to be 100% incorrect, with hard evidence. Thanks for the support.  

[mainline]

minerpart - this is one reason why I (and several others) think you need to step back.  you lose any shred of credibility when you try to argue with an expert.

I showed his statement which made the 1-2 PH plan look void to be 100% incorrect, with hard evidence. Thanks for the support.  

minerpart:
I understand that you see yourself as a brave little David defending Princess Ken from the nasty Goliath.
UR not.
Stop embarrassing the people you try to defend.

[MilkyWayMasta]

LOL @ all the outspoken fans and supporters of this failure! you all cheering up this mess but really you just wait for the moment you can sell your shares quietly and never post here again.in the meantime, the way you all bow down and bend over to your master is just way too funny and desperate to say the least!

This is a bunch of rubbish, I can count only a few, perhaps 5 at most, the amount of cheerleading investors.

Also if anyone thinks that can "quietly" sell their shares, they are in for a surprise. I have already claimed 0.0009 to be the top end of the price range until 28nm is delivered, with the most likely range around 0.0001-0.0004.

Most of the real investors (me and almost everyone else who isn't a troll) are not cheerleading and know that we will have to either sell very cheap to get bitcoin or hold out for a long time (8 months+) and hope that Ken succeeds.

Let's say we get 1 PH out of 100 PH (1%), we would be receiving 36 of the 3600 BTC mined a day. In a month that would be 1080 BTC. Let's say half goes to dividends, (540 BTC / 10,000,000 shares) = 0.000054 BTC per share a month. How much is that worth?

Half would be 504btc a month.

Weekly dividend of 0.0000126
Share price valuation of 0.002205
from how I do my shizz.

Half would be 540 not 504 BTC. How did you get that share price from those dividends? 30% APY?

[JimmyJazz]

LOL @ all the outspoken fans and supporters of this failure! you all cheering up this mess but really you just wait for the moment you can sell your shares quietly and never post here again.in the meantime, the way you all bow down and bend over to your master is just way too funny and desperate to say the least!

This is a bunch of rubbish, I can count only a few, perhaps 5 at most, the amount of cheerleading investors.

Also if anyone thinks that can "quietly" sell their shares, they are in for a surprise. I have already claimed 0.0009 to be the top end of the price range until 28nm is delivered, with the most likely range around 0.0001-0.0004.

Most of the real investors (me and almost everyone else who isn't a troll) are not cheerleading and know that we will have to either sell very cheap to get bitcoin or hold out for a long time (8 months+) and hope that Ken succeeds.

Let's say we get 1 PH out of 100 PH (1%), we would be receiving 36 of the 3600 BTC mined a day. In a month that would be 1080 BTC. Let's say half goes to dividends, (540 BTC / 10,000,000 shares) = 0.000054 BTC per share a month. How much is that worth?

Half would be 504btc a month.

Weekly dividend of 0.0000126
Share price valuation of 0.002205
from how I do my shizz.

Half would be 540 not 504 BTC. How did you get that share price from those dividends? 30% APY?

1008btc a month no?

I got that calculation from some really bad analysis of similar company's share prices after each dividend paid.
As I don't buy into this argument that the company share should reflect the fiat 'valuation'. My opinion is that it should be based on the weekly dividend in BTC.

[EduardoDeCastro]

...
As I don't buy into this argument that the company share should reflect the fiat 'valuation'. My opinion is that it should be based on the weekly dividend in BTC.

How to make money in bitcoin securities:

1. sell sharez.
2. double the weekly divs.
3. sharez double in value.  //aka ? ? ?
4. If !Enough_Monyz Goto 2.  //aka rinse & repeat
5. PROFIT.

[MrTeal]

minerpart - this is one reason why I (and several others) think you need to step back.  you lose any shred of credibility when you try to argue with an expert.

I showed his statement which made the 1-2 PH plan look void to be 100% incorrect, with hard evidence. Thanks for the support.  

Hard evidence? Come on now, that's just silly. I didn't say it was void, just that getting it done in Q2 when the chips are slated to arrive in Q2 is next to impossible.

Let's play with some numbers, shall we? Please fill in the blanks. Let's assume for a minute that this farm will be going into a large datacenter already, and that Ken will just be able to show up with the rack mount equipment ready to be bolted into place.
How long do you think that installation will take?
Before he can do that though, all those machines need to be configured. We're talking about on the order of 1000 4U rack cases here assuming 1TH/s per unit. How long will that take?
Before that can happen though, he needs to build those 1000 4U cases up and test them. How long will that take?

I would posit that from the time cases are ready to be built to the time the whole system is live hashing will not be less than a month. Feel free to provide your own numbers.

Before that happens, he needs boards which will need to be tested. Let's just spitball that he's got a very high density system and has 32 chips per board for ~61GH/s, with 16 boards per 4U chassis. That's probably optimistic, but we'll roll with it. That would be 1TH/s per 4U at about 2kW which works nicely. To build out 1PH/s, you would need 16,000 boards. Even with automated programming and test jigs, how long will that take to do?

Of course, before that you need to assemble these 16,000 boards. Large assembly houses can process a huge volume, but setup and inspection does not happen instantaneously. How long will assembly take?

Before assembly can happen though, you need all the components. These can be done in parallel, but not before the board/system is tested and finalized.
1. Boards
2. ASICs
3. Everything else

You can say that the boards could be ready beforehand, but ordering 16,000 PCBs before the design is tested is foolhardy. You're not going to be able to place your volume order until after you have tested the complete system. What's the lead time on an order of 16,000 PCBs?
Likewise the ASICs. To get 1PH/s you're talking about over half a million chips. If you're getting around 4k chips per wafer, that's 128 wafers. I think that many wafer starts with a completely untested design is a bit unwise anyway, but let's say you do it. You would almost certainly wait on metalizing most of those wafers until you have preliminary functional tests so you don't have to scrap hundreds of thousands worth of chips if there is an issue. How long will it take to finish the wafers, saw and package them once testing is done?
For everything else, what do you think your lead times are there? You can order all the components in advance assuming the board design will just work, so let's say 0. Otherwise, expect 6-8 weeks if you're ordering something like 64,000 power inductors for the DC/DC convertor.

So, for the above items from a finalized design to having 16,000 hashing boards done (plus whatever ancillary boards are needed), what are your time estimates on that?

Before that you need to have a finalized design. This is going to be far and away the most variable part of the deployment. Best case, from the time you first get sample chips to when you sign off on the design might be a week if you're reckless and extremely lucky. That's the absolute best case. More likely you're looking at several weeks including debugging software and a couple board spins. Remember this isn't even like KnC where they were shipping early units a week later despite issues with boards blowing up due to power supply issues that got fixed on a later spin. If you're compressing the schedule as much as we're trying here, you have to torture test that design or face writing off millions of dollars if issues pop up that you didn't catch in your couple days of testing.

So, when you add that all together, what kind of time from chips off the line to 1PH/s hashing do you see? Note there's no real allowance for anything going wrong here, if you want to you should probably add in a factor to account for not everything going perfectly.

Keep in mind this is all entirely contrived. There's a reason why large deployments like this are staged, the entire thing becomes unmanageable if it gets too large. Doing it based around an entirely untested design is insanity. I would actually be more worried if Ken said he was immediately ordering 1PH/s (and millions of dollars) worth of hardware in the first batch before field deploying anything than if he said it will take a few months from the time the first hardware is online to when the mine is fully deployed.

[canth]

I'll ballpark an estimate for a high density colo facility. I could get an exact quote if anyone wanted to be certain.

$5k/rack for 20kW non redundant power - that would get you 10X4U miners per rack. You'd need 100 racks to get to 1000 miners or around $500K/month in cost. The good news is that I'd wager that it could be done in 30 days or less. The bad news is that it would require a minimal commitment of 1 year and I'm not sure that those prices would be valid for anything less than a 3 year commit.

[kleeck]

The type of Data Center I use and am responsible for is not a rental space. It is for my company, exclusively. We do use one about 40 miles away that does have rackspace for rent that could absolutely absorb 2MW (they're currently expanding into a one million square foot renovation). Off the top of my head the one "room" (it's more like a hallway with hallways off of it) we have at the commercial space holds ten rows with 9 racks per row so that's 90 racks in one "room" if you're using both sides of the area.

 
Wow, a 1 million square foot DC is an absolutely huge facility. I might be out of date, but that would have been one of the largest in the world just a couple years ago. That's going to be a multi-billion dollar renovation. I'm sure a facility like that could definitely squeeze in an extra couple MW without batting an eye.

Yeah. The building was an old MASSIVE Studebaker factory. They're running a big tunnel between the current area we use and the new remodeled area. They're planning on having wind turbines on the top of the building to help offset electricity costs. It's going to be pretty awesome.

[finlof]

minerpart - this is one reason why I (and several others) think you need to step back.  you lose any shred of credibility when you try to argue with an expert.

I showed his statement which made the 1-2 PH plan look void to be 100% incorrect, with hard evidence. Thanks for the support.  

Hard evidence? Come on now, that's just silly. I didn't say it was void, just that getting it done in Q2 when the chips are slated to arrive in Q2 is next to impossible.

Let's play with some numbers, shall we? Please fill in the blanks. Let's assume for a minute that this farm will be going into a large datacenter already, and that Ken will just be able to show up with the rack mount equipment ready to be bolted into place.
How long do you think that installation will take?
Before he can do that though, all those machines need to be configured. We're talking about on the order of 1000 4U rack cases here assuming 1TH/s per unit. How long will that take?
Before that can happen though, he needs to build those 1000 4U cases up and test them. How long will that take?

I would posit that from the time cases are ready to be built to the time the whole system is live hashing will not be less than a month. Feel free to provide your own numbers.

Before that happens, he needs boards which will need to be tested. Let's just spitball that he's got a very high density system and has 32 chips per board for ~61GH/s, with 16 boards per 4U chassis. That's probably optimistic, but we'll roll with it. That would be 1TH/s per 4U at about 2kW which works nicely. To build out 1PH/s, you would need 16,000 boards. Even with automated programming and test jigs, how long will that take to do?

Of course, before that you need to assemble these 16,000 boards. Large assembly houses can process a huge volume, but setup and inspection does not happen instantaneously. How long will assembly take?

Before assembly can happen though, you need all the components. These can be done in parallel, but not before the board/system is tested and finalized.
1. Boards
2. ASICs
3. Everything else

You can say that the boards could be ready beforehand, but ordering 16,000 PCBs before the design is tested is foolhardy. You're not going to be able to place your volume order until after you have tested the complete system. What's the lead time on an order of 16,000 PCBs?
Likewise the ASICs. To get 1PH/s you're talking about over half a million chips. If you're getting around 4k chips per wafer, that's 128 wafers. I think that many wafer starts with a completely untested design is a bit unwise anyway, but let's say you do it. You would almost certainly wait on metalizing most of those wafers until you have preliminary functional tests so you don't have to scrap hundreds of thousands worth of chips if there is an issue. How long will it take to finish the wafers, saw and package them once testing is done?
For everything else, what do you think your lead times are there? You can order all the components in advance assuming the board design will just work, so let's say 0. Otherwise, expect 6-8 weeks if you're ordering something like 64,000 power inductors for the DC/DC convertor.

So, for the above items from a finalized design to having 16,000 hashing boards done (plus whatever ancillary boards are needed), what are your time estimates on that?

Before that you need to have a finalized design. This is going to be far and away the most variable part of the deployment. Best case, from the time you first get sample chips to when you sign off on the design might be a week if you're reckless and extremely lucky. That's the absolute best case. More likely you're looking at several weeks including debugging software and a couple board spins. Remember this isn't even like KnC where they were shipping early units a week later despite issues with boards blowing up due to power supply issues that got fixed on a later spin. If you're compressing the schedule as much as we're trying here, you have to torture test that design or face writing off millions of dollars if issues pop up that you didn't catch in your couple days of testing.

So, when you add that all together, what kind of time from chips off the line to 1PH/s hashing do you see? Note there's no real allowance for anything going wrong here, if you want to you should probably add in a factor to account for not everything going perfectly.

Keep in mind this is all entirely contrived. There's a reason why large deployments like this are staged, the entire thing becomes unmanageable if it gets too large. Doing it based around an entirely untested design is insanity. I would actually be more worried if Ken said he was immediately ordering 1PH/s (and millions of dollars) worth of hardware in the first batch before field deploying anything than if he said it will take a few months from the time the first hardware is online to when the mine is fully deployed.

this.  all of this.  even if we have a working chip in 2nd Qtr ALL OF THIS has to be done.  looks like getting the chip is the easy part and that has taken almost a year...

[knybe]

is this pipe dream getting pipier?

[shaofis]

I'll ballpark an estimate for a high density colo facility. I could get an exact quote if anyone wanted to be certain.

$5k/rack for 20kW non redundant power - that would get you 10X4U miners per rack. You'd need 100 racks to get to 1000 miners or around $500K/month in cost. The good news is that I'd wager that it could be done in 30 days or less. The bad news is that it would require a minimal commitment of 1 year and I'm not sure that those prices would be valid for anything less than a 3 year commit.

Curious; where did we come up with the 100 racks or 1000 miners?

[mainline]

Nah.  Everything's fine.  Just hang in for a few more months, you'll be OK.
@shaofis: Ken already had like a few dozen cases and a couple of power supplies.  That's about all that you need to start a megafarm.
That and some faith.

[minerpart]

Let's play with some numbers, shall we? Please fill in the blanks.

A ridiculously long post, and it's filled with assumptions, inaccuracies and unanswerable speculative questions. How long is a piece of string?

-100PH by when? Who determined that? Do you have that in writing and are you considering the possibility of a plateau in difficulty rises? So that is a guess with a large margin of error which you fail to note. Total hash could be 75PH by the time the farm opens so reducing the required capacity of our farm by 25% - future hash rate it is an unknown figure.

-The 4U expansion units are not 1TH each, there are 6 expansion cases and one master case for our full-sized 55nm-based 10.488TH/s rig giving a figure of 1.498TH/s per unit. You are such an expert (proved substantively wrong twice already today) but you couldn't work that out with available figures. So your guestimate on this figure is 50% out - because you didn't do the research.

-So we knock 33% off your 16k boards figure to give 10,666 boards.
Suddenly outlay and workload and investment in resources is reduced by a third - and that is fact not a guestimate.

-Wafer numbers - the UMC foundry we are using has a capacity of 45,000 12inch wafers per month. I can't find details on how many chips per wafer UMC will be fabbing.

-The rest of your post is speculation. What are my time estimates on 10k boards? I don't have any, I'm not a PCB fabricator you would need to ask Ken's engineering team that one. Certainly your knowledge of the industry seem a bit sub-par so with respect I'll trust Ken's expert team on their estimates for this project over yours.

[minerpart]

this.  all of this.  

finflof you haven't replied to my pm about why you think my my earlier posts were so out of order.

I find it concerning that you accept every word of this Mr Teal without question. His figures have not even been researched or cross-checked with the official figures as stated by Ken. Yet you agree with his every word? Every one?

edit - just got your reply. The point was you can acquire industrial commercial premises with large power supply already connected.

[st4nl3y]

now lets have a brief look on how the VMC competition is doing...
1.Bitmine has received their 28nm bitfury chips and are assembling/testing/shipping miners as we speak.
2.Cointerra is still testing but will start shipping in matter of days

some photos from Bitmine







looks way better and more convincing than 3 empty workbenches in a garage

[Bargraphics]

Let's play with some numbers, shall we? Please fill in the blanks.

A ridiculously long post, and it's filled with assumptions, inaccuracies and unanswerable speculative questions. How long is a piece of string?

-100PH by when? Who determined that? Do you have that in writing and are you considering the possibility of a plateau in difficulty rises? So that is a guess with a large margin of error which you fail to note. Total hash could be 75PH by then which would reduce the required capacity of our farm by 25% - future hash rate it is an unknown figure.

-The 4U expansion units are not 1TH each, there are 6 expansion cases and one master case for our full-sized 55nm-based 10.488TH/s rig giving a figure of 1.498TH/s per unit. You are such an expert (proved substantively wrong twice already today) but you couldn't work that out with available figures. So your guestimate on this figure is 50% out - because you didn't do the research.

-So we knock 33% off your 16k boards figure to give 10,666 boards.
Suddenly outlay and workload and investment in resources is reduced by a third - and that is fact not a guestimate.

-Wafer numbers - the UMC foundry we are using has a capacity of 45,000 12inch wafers per month. I can't find details on how many chips per wafer UMC will be fabbing.

-The rest of your post is speculation. What are my time estimates on 10k boards? I don't have any, I'm not a PCB fabricator you would need to ask Ken's engineering team that one. Certainly your knowledge of the industry seem a bit sub-par so with respect I'll trust Ken's expert team on their estimates for this project over yours.

Actually MrTeal is pretty much spot on with just about everything he has said.

As far as his "Knowledge' he and ChipGeek have designed, created, and shipped a successful product using BFLs chips so I will trust his knowledge on PCB timeframes and sourcing components.

I second that having 1-2 PH up and running in the timeframe mentioned would be very difficult but not impossible.

[kleeck]

minerpart - this is one reason why I (and several others) think you need to step back.  you lose any shred of credibility when you try to argue with an expert.

I showed his statement which made the 1-2 PH plan look void to be 100% incorrect, with hard evidence. Thanks for the support.  

Hard evidence? Come on now, that's just silly. I didn't say it was void, just that getting it done in Q2 when the chips are slated to arrive in Q2 is next to impossible.

Let's play with some numbers, shall we? Please fill in the blanks. Let's assume for a minute that this farm will be going into a large datacenter already, and that Ken will just be able to show up with the rack mount equipment ready to be bolted into place.
How long do you think that installation will take?
Before he can do that though, all those machines need to be configured. We're talking about on the order of 1000 4U rack cases here assuming 1TH/s per unit. How long will that take?
Before that can happen though, he needs to build those 1000 4U cases up and test them. How long will that take?

I would posit that from the time cases are ready to be built to the time the whole system is live hashing will not be less than a month. Feel free to provide your own numbers.

Before that happens, he needs boards which will need to be tested. Let's just spitball that he's got a very high density system and has 32 chips per board for ~61GH/s, with 16 boards per 4U chassis. That's probably optimistic, but we'll roll with it. That would be 1TH/s per 4U at about 2kW which works nicely. To build out 1PH/s, you would need 16,000 boards. Even with automated programming and test jigs, how long will that take to do?

Of course, before that you need to assemble these 16,000 boards. Large assembly houses can process a huge volume, but setup and inspection does not happen instantaneously. How long will assembly take?

Before assembly can happen though, you need all the components. These can be done in parallel, but not before the board/system is tested and finalized.
1. Boards
2. ASICs
3. Everything else

You can say that the boards could be ready beforehand, but ordering 16,000 PCBs before the design is tested is foolhardy. You're not going to be able to place your volume order until after you have tested the complete system. What's the lead time on an order of 16,000 PCBs?
Likewise the ASICs. To get 1PH/s you're talking about over half a million chips. If you're getting around 4k chips per wafer, that's 128 wafers. I think that many wafer starts with a completely untested design is a bit unwise anyway, but let's say you do it. You would almost certainly wait on metalizing most of those wafers until you have preliminary functional tests so you don't have to scrap hundreds of thousands worth of chips if there is an issue. How long will it take to finish the wafers, saw and package them once testing is done?
For everything else, what do you think your lead times are there? You can order all the components in advance assuming the board design will just work, so let's say 0. Otherwise, expect 6-8 weeks if you're ordering something like 64,000 power inductors for the DC/DC convertor.

So, for the above items from a finalized design to having 16,000 hashing boards done (plus whatever ancillary boards are needed), what are your time estimates on that?

Before that you need to have a finalized design. This is going to be far and away the most variable part of the deployment. Best case, from the time you first get sample chips to when you sign off on the design might be a week if you're reckless and extremely lucky. That's the absolute best case. More likely you're looking at several weeks including debugging software and a couple board spins. Remember this isn't even like KnC where they were shipping early units a week later despite issues with boards blowing up due to power supply issues that got fixed on a later spin. If you're compressing the schedule as much as we're trying here, you have to torture test that design or face writing off millions of dollars if issues pop up that you didn't catch in your couple days of testing.

So, when you add that all together, what kind of time from chips off the line to 1PH/s hashing do you see? Note there's no real allowance for anything going wrong here, if you want to you should probably add in a factor to account for not everything going perfectly.

Keep in mind this is all entirely contrived. There's a reason why large deployments like this are staged, the entire thing becomes unmanageable if it gets too large. Doing it based around an entirely untested design is insanity. I would actually be more worried if Ken said he was immediately ordering 1PH/s (and millions of dollars) worth of hardware in the first batch before field deploying anything than if he said it will take a few months from the time the first hardware is online to when the mine is fully deployed.

this.  all of this.  even if we have a working chip in 2nd Qtr ALL OF THIS has to be done.  looks like getting the chip is the easy part and that has taken almost a year...

I don't see anything in this that indicates that chips arriving in Q2 could not be mining within that same quarter, i.e. 3 months time.

This is not a pipe dream. We are not taming unicorns, here. I'm not saying that for absolute sure ActM will have a 1-2PH farm in Q2, but it is in the realm of possibility in this day and age.

The design is done. Tape-out indicates the final step of the design process, once all details have been worked out, (although certain things can come up that require re-spins). Once we have the first article we will know if any re-spins are necessary or not. Board design is done long before Q2 and might very well be done already. Pick and place is lightning fast and completely automated. Placed boards will be tested and be sent to be placed in the actual machines, which will be a second point of testing, ensuring that the boards work with the rest of the device and mining software.

This has been done so many times long before Bitcoin that it is comical how so many think of this as some unattainable or unreachable goal.