Next generation 14nm mining grid

[crumbs]

I'll wait to see if my emails will be returned by tomorrow, and make some phone calls if they are not.
All the links you have given are over a year old, just like the cellphone article you've linked to, and none offer anything more than what a good PR girl couldn't accomplish in 3 days of cold calls & Press release spamming.  Got anything more recent?

I'll check out your desktop app on a junk drive & see what it does when this gets tiring.  What's it do?
P.S:  Could you give me a hint about the right person to contact at OXFAM?  I'm afraid that the emails i sent won't get a quick response, and we do want to clear this up, right?

P.P.S:  Could you give me a list of your current "ethical" clients, or does your app add new zomblers to an aging botet, so u can mine some dust?
(but better still, just GTFO my bitcoin)

[EBM]

I'll wait to see if my emails will be returned by tomorrow, and make some phone calls if they are not.
All the links you have given are over a year old, just like the cellphone article you've linked to, and none offer anything more than what a good PR girl couldn't accomplish in 3 days of cold calls & Press release spamming.  Got anything more recent?

I'll check out your desktop app on a junk drive & see what it does when this gets tiring.  What's it do
P.S:  Could you give me a hint about the right person to contact at OXFAM?  I'm afraid that the emails i sent won't get a quick response, and we do want to clear this up, right?

I deliberately chose older coverage to prove we're not some recent invention. I don't know how you reconcile the 'PR girl with three days of spamming' being able to go back in time to do those stories, either.

More recent stuff: the Channel 4 News TV piece was 9th August of this year: http://www.channel4.com/news/facebook-fake-likes-online-business-charity-engine

Other stuff from 2013:

http://europe.nxtbook.com/emp/outsource/Outsource_31/index.php#/72
http://www.angelnews.co.uk/article.jsf?articleId=15050 (click the link in the article)
http://exhibit.hpcexperiment.com/resources/charity-engine/

We are members of the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF) (http://desktopgridfederation.org/members) and the Cloud Advisory Council (http://cloudadvisorycouncil.com/members.php).

We have EU science funding as part of the IDGF Support Project and we've been invited to several international conferences including TechCrunch Disrupt (NYC), NAFEMS (Boston), TNW Amsterdam, the International Supercomputing Conference (twice) and most recently the Dublin Web Summit.

All this is a matter of public record and easily found on Google.

Our contact at Oxfam is quoted - and named - in one of that previous list of articles, by the way.

PS. I appreciate the burden of proof is on us to show we are genuine. But equally, it is completely unfair for you to decide - and declare - otherwise without even waiting for the results of your own inquiries.

[EBM]

what mobile sha256 chips are you referencing exactly? as far as i know, sure some modern smartphones have dedicated hw crypto engines, for example with iphone - aes & sha1 for key derivation, boot-chain verification and accelerated, transparent encrypt/decryption and data protection

but these are not 'asics' in the sense we are usually referring to and you cannot use them as such, you can't make any sort of app which would pass apples approval process & it's not like you could even jailbreak your phone and access the engine from userland, you'd need a low level exploit from kernel, iboot or bootrom to try and talk with it in any meaningful way,,really you'd be limited to using main ap, jus compiled arm

Apple's not in the picture, for the reasons you describe (and others). It's Android-only for now.

The mobile SHA-256 chips are not in production cellphones yet - but they will be by the end of 2014.

The article linked to in the OP is what first alerted us that mobile mining could become more than just a pointless afterthought, thanks to these new chips. We have since confirmed (as best we can) that they will indeed be accessible and usable for mining.

[crumbs]

...
Our contact at Oxfam is quoted - and named - in one of that previous list of articles, by the way.

Would you mind giving me the name?  I have already got a "Dear Supporter" form letter telling me to expect a personal reply within
2 working days

Regarding your absurd mining cellphone idea:
1.  What makes you think that SHA256 ASICs will be incorporated into cell phones by the end of 2014?  Be specific.
2.  What would these chips be doing in the cell phones?
3.  If these chips are x10 more efficient than current gen chips, how long do you think a cell phone battery would last while hashing at a meaningful rate?
4.  Perhaps offer a list of your current "ethical" clients.  Being mentioned in blogs and human interest stories doesn't lend you much credibility -- all of them sound like filler copypasted from a PR release.

Your idea is inane.  It is no more interesting than a kid mining dust with a botnet.  Sure you can distribute an app to jailbroken old phones, but who cares?  Your entire botnet won't mine a tenth of what a single current gen (at the time) miner would.  Pointless waste of battery life.
Now go away.
 

[Anotheranonlol]

what mobile sha256 chips are you referencing exactly? as far as i know, sure some modern smartphones have dedicated hw crypto engines, for example with iphone - aes & sha1 for key derivation, boot-chain verification and accelerated, transparent encrypt/decryption and data protection

but these are not 'asics' in the sense we are usually referring to and you cannot use them as such, you can't make any sort of app which would pass apples approval process & it's not like you could even jailbreak your phone and access the engine from userland, you'd need a low level exploit from kernel, iboot or bootrom to try and talk with it in any meaningful way,,really you'd be limited to using main ap, jus compiled arm

Apple's not in the picture, for the reasons you describe (and others). It's Android-only for now.

The mobile SHA-256 chips are not in production cellphones yet - but they will be by the end of 2014.

The article linked to in the OP is what first alerted us that mobile mining could become more than just a pointless afterthought, thanks to these new chips. We have since confirmed (as best we can) that they will indeed be accessible and usable for mining.

article does not really say much, do you mean like airmont, cherry trail etc?

[EBM]

...
Our contact at Oxfam is quoted - and named - in one of that previous list of articles, by the way.

Would you mind giving me the name?  I have already got a "Dear Supporter" form letter telling me to expect a personal reply within
2 working days

Regarding your absurd mining cellphone idea:
1.  What makes you think that SHA256 ASICs will be incorporated into cell phones by the end of 2014?  Be specific.
2.  What would these chips be doing in the cell phones?
3.  If these chips are x10 more efficient than current gen chips, how long do you think a cell phone battery would last while hashing at a meaningful rate?
4.  Perhaps offer a list of your current "ethical" clients.  Being mentioned in blogs and human interest stories doesn't lend you much credibility -- all of them sound like filler copypasted from a PR release.

Your idea is inane.  It is no more interesting than a kid mining dust with a botnet.  Sure you can distribute an app to jailbroken old phones, but who cares?  Your entire botnet won't mine a tenth of what a single current gen (at the time) miner would.  Pointless waste of battery life.
Now go away.
 

Consider us gone away.

[FloatesMcgoates]

The overwhelming obstacle here is electrical consumption. I imagine that bitcoin mining on a mobile device will be incredibly taxing on the battery of said device, rendering such an activity very hard to perform when the mobile is not docked to a charging station. If this is the case, then the mobile will be at best a USB miner that you can plug in for 8 hours at night when you sleep.

Edit: Also, it would not be unfair to assume such laborous usage of your mobile's battery will lower its life expectancy in the long run

[EBM]

what mobile sha256 chips are you referencing exactly? as far as i know, sure some modern smartphones have dedicated hw crypto engines, for example with iphone - aes & sha1 for key derivation, boot-chain verification and accelerated, transparent encrypt/decryption and data protection

but these are not 'asics' in the sense we are usually referring to and you cannot use them as such, you can't make any sort of app which would pass apples approval process & it's not like you could even jailbreak your phone and access the engine from userland, you'd need a low level exploit from kernel, iboot or bootrom to try and talk with it in any meaningful way,,really you'd be limited to using main ap, jus compiled arm

Apple's not in the picture, for the reasons you describe (and others). It's Android-only for now.

The mobile SHA-256 chips are not in production cellphones yet - but they will be by the end of 2014.

The article linked to in the OP is what first alerted us that mobile mining could become more than just a pointless afterthought, thanks to these new chips. We have since confirmed (as best we can) that they will indeed be accessible and usable for mining.

article does not really say much, do you mean like airmont, cherry trail etc?

Not sure if it's part of them. All I know is that it's additional custom silicon, specifically for SHA-256, for hardware encryption/decryption. Not that much different from any other common task that ends up being moved off the main CPU - graphics being the obvious example.

They won't be able to earn much per cellphone (the SHA-256 chip will only pull a fraction of a watt), certainly not enough for individuals to bother running a miner. But they will be more energy-efficient than any ASIC, because mobile chips are always the latest process, and en masse they'll be able to earn quite a bit.

And that's where the CE model comes in: we make it a prize draw, but also give half the profits to our partner charities - so it's a worthwhile exercise even for those who don't win. Result is a (virtually) free, totally automated, never-ending charity fundraiser and series of massive prize draws. All from idle computing power.

[EBM]

The overwhelming obstacle here is electrical consumption. I imagine that bitcoin mining on a mobile device will be incredibly taxing on the battery of said device, rendering such an activity very hard to perform when the mobile is not docked to a charging station. If this is the case, then the mobile will be at best a USB miner that you can plug in for 8 hours at night when you sleep.

Edit: Also, it would not be unfair to assume such laborous usage of your mobile's battery will lower its life expectancy in the long run

The default is only activate on charging and only use wifi. It also waits until the battery is charged first.

It won't be mining on the CPU, only on the dedicated silicon. Difference in power usage will be an order of magnitude - perhaps 0.5W as opposed to 5W+ if using the CPU full-tilt.

It has to be gentle, you are quite right.

[crumbs]

...
Our contact at Oxfam is quoted - and named - in one of that previous list of articles, by the way.

Would you mind giving me the name?  I have already got a "Dear Supporter" form letter telling me to expect a personal reply within
2 working days

Regarding your absurd mining cellphone idea:
1.  What makes you think that SHA256 ASICs will be incorporated into cell phones by the end of 2014?  Be specific.
2.  What would these chips be doing in the cell phones?
3.  If these chips are x10 more efficient than current gen chips, how long do you think a cell phone battery would last while hashing at a meaningful rate?
4.  Perhaps offer a list of your current "ethical" clients.  Being mentioned in blogs and human interest stories doesn't lend you much credibility -- all of them sound like filler copypasted from a PR release.

Your idea is inane.  It is no more interesting than a kid mining dust with a botnet.  Sure you can distribute an app to jailbroken old phones, but who cares?  Your entire botnet won't mine a tenth of what a single current gen (at the time) miner would.  Pointless waste of battery life.
Now go away.
 

Consider us gone away.

You have not left or answered any of my questions.  Red text above.  Go.

Why is bitcoin suddenly attracting the lowest rang of scammers, the "it makes you money while saving kittens" bottom feeders? 
WTF is wrong with us?

[ldrgn]

Why is bitcoin suddenly attracting the lowest rang of scammers,

Because bitcoiners don't understand finance?

Anyway, some interesting thought.  I don't know if I have enough info/background to make numerical estimates, but I imagine this is what their per-customer margin looks like:

bitcoin dust
less: marginal cost of mining servers/generic work servers
less: marginal cost of advertising (acquiring customers)
less: marginal cost of promotions (avg lottery payout)

The dust revenue is just so, so low do you think that you'll be bumping against problems with just the marginal cost of having a constant connection to a server and getting new shares?  The cost of one network connection to one mining pool has got to be incredibly tiny but so is the revenue you're making from dust.  Bitcoin mining is both your most reliable source of income but also your most server expense-hungry and concurrent network connection-intensive choice.

Advertising: really tricky as you're still being trapped under the upper bound of your dust revenue.  How do you keep your average cost of acquiring a customer that low?  I guess raising tons of investor money in a formal investment series gives you a pass here for now.

Finally, I don't think non-bitcoin sources are going to be moneymakers for these guys.  People who need scientific computing aren't known for their deep pockets - they are funded by grants.  The web scraping thing makes it sound like you've already got a customer which is cool, but I don't see the sustainability for that business model (and I don't know who would pay for it in the first place).  People scrape the web so they can store, index it and query it at a later time.  Your army of smartphones is only going to give you a small bandwidth saving compared to downloading the pages yourself.  Does the cost of outsourcing it to a 3rd party with an elaborate system to manage its workers (aka higher per-scraper cost) going to work out financially?

[hak8or]

I was planning on going to sleep but had to step in here. My personal opinion is that this is either a scam or a VERY misguided individual/group of people.

What SHA-256 chips are you talking about? And why are you referring to them as chips? There is little sense in having a separate dedicated IC in something as compact as a phone.

The article has no mention of SHA-256 chips in cellphones. Why would a cellphone even need an SHA-256 dedicated IC when they already usually have that capability built in to the same die the main processor is on?

Are you saying the ic will be more efficient than current miners? Where are you getting such information from? TSMC? Qualcom? If so, you are horrifically violating NDA.

So you have an app already up and running as a demo? Give some specifics, how does android support such functionality?

Your language is very vague and unprofessional. Your claims are extreme. Your minimum buyin is 250,000 friggen grand. Why on earth are you doing this on a bitcoin forum? Go find some proper venture capital angels. Keep in mind that to have someone invest in you from the USA they need to be an accredited investor.

[User705]

OP are you sure you understand the motivations of bitcoin miners?  Hint: it's not charity.

[EBM]

Why is bitcoin suddenly attracting the lowest rang of scammers,

Because bitcoiners don't understand finance?

Anyway, some interesting thought.  I don't know if I have enough info/background to make numerical estimates, but I imagine this is what their per-customer margin looks like:

bitcoin dust
less: marginal cost of mining servers/generic work servers
less: marginal cost of advertising (acquiring customers)
less: marginal cost of promotions (avg lottery payout)

The dust revenue is just so, so low do you think that you'll be bumping against problems with just the marginal cost of having a constant connection to a server and getting new shares?  The cost of one network connection to one mining pool has got to be incredibly tiny but so is the revenue you're making from dust.  Bitcoin mining is both your most reliable source of income but also your most server expense-hungry and concurrent network connection-intensive choice.

Advertising: really tricky as you're still being trapped under the upper bound of your dust revenue.  How do you keep your average cost of acquiring a customer that low?  I guess raising tons of investor money in a formal investment series gives you a pass here for now.

Finally, I don't think non-bitcoin sources are going to be moneymakers for these guys.  People who need scientific computing aren't known for their deep pockets - they are funded by grants.  The web scraping thing makes it sound like you've already got a customer which is cool, but I don't see the sustainability for that business model (and I don't know who would pay for it in the first place).  People scrape the web so they can store, index it and query it at a later time.  Your army of smartphones is only going to give you a small bandwidth saving compared to downloading the pages yourself.  Does the cost of outsourcing it to a 3rd party with an elaborate system to manage its workers (aka higher per-scraper cost) going to work out financially?

A few key points here, I'll try to address them all...

The obvious one: mining BTC doesn't pay nearly as well as scientific and/or commercial computing. Nor is it what CE is designed to do (as I said, we're a computing platform, not a mining company). And yes, those guys are often on tight budgets. But that's great, because our platform is basically the cheapest computing you can hire - approx 10x cheaper than Amazon EC2, for example.

It's not as flexible as the likes of AWS or Azure, but for pile-it-high-sell-it-cheap raw computing you cannot beat volunteer-based grids like ours. We sell computing time for 1c per typical core/hour, and we also do massively distributed storage now (think RAID 10,000).

The distributed web-crawling is the stalking horse, perhaps even more so than the mobile mining, because mobile devices on wifi can web-crawl pretty much as well as any PC. It's a very CPU-light task. In fact, it's about the best possible use for a distributed grid of mobile devices.

The money in it is huge: Google alone spends over a billion dollars per year and uses 500k+ servers just for web-crawling. They have no choice if they want the search engine to stay up to date. Even back when they invented it, Brin & Page knew a distributed system would be the most efficient method but nobody knew how to persuade the public to participate (see 2nd para, 9.2: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html )

Lots of other companies need web-crawling, too. From seeking out phishing websites to scanning Twitter for stock market 'emotion' keywords, it's not just search engines. Plus, a distributed grid has the huge advantage of every node having its own unique IP address. Facebook, Twitter and many other sites restrict visitors to one page per second per IP address, just to foil crawlers. Doesn't affect us.

Website diagnostics, pen testing, anything that really just needs bandwidth and lots of nodes: also ideal for a grid of mobiles quietly working at night time.

(Mobiles can also compute, of course. They're nowhere near PC level, but they are virtually free to use, power-wise, and a quad core 1.5 GHz chip with 2GB RAM isn't useless by any means. Especially if you have a few million of them.)

Mining on our grid will only be a big deal when these cellphone SHA-256 chips appear, because by then we'll have been running the CE Android app for months anyway (mainly web-crawling), and should have some big install numbers. And although we've no idea what the little things will actually earn, we do know they'll be the most efficient chips out there. Samsung and friends don't do last-gen processes.

Cheers,
Mark

[EBM]

I was planning on going to sleep but had to step in here. My personal opinion is that this is either a scam or a VERY misguided individual/group of people.

What SHA-256 chips are you talking about? And why are you referring to them as chips? There is little sense in having a separate dedicated IC in something as compact as a phone.

The article has no mention of SHA-256 chips in cellphones. Why would a cellphone even need an SHA-256 dedicated IC when they already usually have that capability built in to the same die the main processor is on?

Are you saying the ic will be more efficient than current miners? Where are you getting such information from? TSMC? Qualcom? If so, you are horrifically violating NDA.

So you have an app already up and running as a demo? Give some specifics, how does android support such functionality?

Your language is very vague and unprofessional. Your claims are extreme. Your minimum buyin is 250,000 friggen grand. Why on earth are you doing this on a bitcoin forum? Go find some proper venture capital angels. Keep in mind that to have someone invest in you from the USA they need to be an accredited investor.

In that article:

"Columbia’s Sethumadhavan says custom ASICs may soon face a challenge from chips for mobile devices with circuits dedicated to performing encryption operations. These chips, expected next year, will probably be designed to a standard higher than the miners can reach and could be used to build powerful mining rigs without ASICs."

We already have VC angel financing, and we're getting more. The reason for posting our pitch deck here was mentioned in the first line of the OP: this could become a significant BTC grid.

Apologies if it seemed vague, I can't put forward every last detail in a forum post - hence the link to our pitch deck and the invitation to email for further info. Which five people have already done.

You are quite correct about the US and accredited investors, I'll amend the OP to reflect that.

[railzand]

How to harness it? ● Offer to buy the surplus compute power ● ● ● Been tried, doesn't work for home users – a few pennies per day doesn't impress anyone PC power only valuable en masse, not individually Ask for volunteered resources ● Only works for popular science projects ● Growth is flat; all the science fans are taken ● New projects dare not compete for volunteers

-quoted from your pitch

so please eli5.

home users don't care for a few pennies a day

if you add up a billion of them not caring, this makes you how much?

edit~: you'll lose less money for investors than i first thought, because Samsung et al. won't sell a billion high end phones with 'asics' in for a while yet

[EBM]

OP are you sure you understand the motivations of bitcoin miners?  Hint: it's not charity.

We're specifically NOT seeking bitcoin miners - or even techie users.

We're seeking the non-technical general public who don't give two hoots about mining, protein-folding, web-crawling, molecular modelling, climate simulations, CFD, rendering, etc - and persuading them to compute for it anyway. They make up the vast majority of device owners.

[EBM]

How to harness it? ● Offer to buy the surplus compute power ● ● ● Been tried, doesn't work for home users – a few pennies per day doesn't impress anyone PC power only valuable en masse, not individually Ask for volunteered resources ● Only works for popular science projects ● Growth is flat; all the science fans are taken ● New projects dare not compete for volunteers

-quoted from your pitch

so please eli5.

home users don't care for a few pennies a day

if you add up a billion of them not caring, this makes you how much?

I don't understand the question, sorry.

If you mean 'how much would we make with a billion users' - it would be huge, of course.
If you mean 'how much would we make if nobody cares to join up' - it would be zero. But we have several thousand users already.

[railzand]

Never-ending random payouts, constantly raising money for charity, free to download – what's not to like?
Even if the user doesn't win a prize, they're always computing for good

-quoted from your pitch

no one in their right mind buys a lottery ticket

you already said no one cares about computing for good, well maybe several thousand yip-de-do

don't be obtuse. you can't persuade enough people to buy a high end phone and join your club

anyone with a good phone would mine for themselves, then choose which charity to donate to

if they could mine with a phone

[ChefBorjan]

Hi there.

To counterbalance the healthy skepticism of some and frankly rude behaviour of others, I'd like to say that I find your idea very interesting. Unlike others, I can see what you are aiming to achieve here and think it could really work.

I'm also pleased to see a British company taking steps towards innovation in the bitcoin world. I don't have  early enough money to take part in this, but I wish you the best of luck. If you succeed, it can only be good for bitcoin as a whole.