1GH/s, 20w, $500 — Butterflylabs, is it a scam?

[malevolent]

Find us at

Address: 25E 12th Street
Kansas City, Missouri 64106
United States of America
Phone: 816 226 6966
Fax: 816 226 6966
e-mail: contact@butterflylabs.com
Skype: butterflylabs

Anyone from Kansas or around could verify this 'company'?

[Raoul Duke]

Find us at

Address: 25E 12th Street
Kansas City, Missouri 64106
United States of America
Phone: 816 226 6966
Fax: 816 226 6966
e-mail: contact@butterflylabs.com
Skype: butterflylabs

Anyone from Kansas or around could verify this 'company'?

WTF
lol?

[Turbor]

  wheres Inaba ?!

[sadpandatech]

Find us at

Address: 25E 12th Street
Kansas City, Missouri 64106
United States of America
Phone: 816 226 6966
Fax: 816 226 6966
e-mail: contact@butterflylabs.com
Skype: butterflylabs

Anyone from Kansas or around could verify this 'company'?

WTF
lol?

 Hehe, what your friend Psy here meant to say was, "This has been covered to death in this thread already" and furthermore, "They have met with Inaba who lives in the area last night, also covered in this thread." ;p

[P4man]

Die shrink will ultimately delivery 2x the performance both per $ and per Watt.  That is the whole reason for die shrinks.    

Per dollar, hmm  you should get ~twice the transistor density, so for a given size you would get twice the performance, but thats ignoring the exponential higher fixed costs for these new process nodes. Just compare wafer prices at 65nm with 40/45nm at TSMC. Good luck getting 2x better performance per $!.

Per watt, 2x from just a shrink is more than just optimistic. In reality its always a lot less, and its not likely anything like moving to s-asic (particularly with little to no IO and RAM):


Sorry, an extra process shrink just isnt going to make up for that.

[sadpandatech]

wheres Inaba ?!

  Ayee, maybe they kidnapped him so he couldn't reveal their evil scam. ;p  Or he could have gotten a unit and is too busy drooling over it to report in.

  Inabaaaa

[Inaba]

As I said yesterday, we'd either be doing the demo Saturday or Sunday.  Right now, we have it planned for Sunday evening here in CST, probably around 18:00.  I've been pretty swamped today, but tomorrow is mostly open.

[sadpandatech]

As I said yesterday, we'd either be doing the demo Saturday or Sunday.  Right now, we have it planned for Sunday evening here in CST, probably around 18:00.  I've been pretty swamped today, but tomorrow is mostly open.

  Thanks for the updates. So what is the demo plan exactly? Are they coming to your place with a unit or two to demo them?

[bulanula]

Thank you for the updates Inaba. Hope you stay out of the "dark side" and avoid the temptation.

Looking forward to Sunday 18:00.

[Inaba]

The demo plan is that I will:

A) connect it to a non-routable development side of the pool, so that the box is unable to communicate with the internet.  I will then let it submit shares to the pool and I will have one of the getwork servers in debug mode and I will see what is sent out and what's sent back.  As I found no evidence of any wireless communications on the board, and since the computer it's connected to will not be on the internet, it won't have any way of falsifying the shares submitted.

B) I will take a unit home that evening, disassemble and take more robust pictures.  I will NOT be removing any heat sinks, however. 

C) I will do further testing that evening on my own with a packet analyzer to see  what packets are being transmitted, when and where they are going and coming from.

That's the plan as of right now, at any rate.

[worldinacoin]

The demo plan is that I will:

A) connect it to a non-routable development side of the pool, so that the box is unable to communicate with the internet.  I will then let it submit shares to the pool and I will have one of the getwork servers in debug mode and I will see what is sent out and what's sent back.  As I found no evidence of any wireless communications on the board, and since the computer it's connected to will not be on the internet, it won't have any way of falsifying the shares submitted.

B) I will take a unit home that evening, disassemble and take more robust pictures.  I will NOT be removing any heat sinks, however. 

C) I will do further testing that evening on my own with a packet analyzer to see  what packets are being transmitted, when and where they are going and coming from.

That's the plan as of right now, at any rate.

Appreciated your efforts, waiting to see the results . 

[sadpandatech]

The demo plan is that I will:

A) connect it to a non-routable development side of the pool, so that the box is unable to communicate with the internet.  I will then let it submit shares to the pool and I will have one of the getwork servers in debug mode and I will see what is sent out and what's sent back.  As I found no evidence of any wireless communications on the board, and since the computer it's connected to will not be on the internet, it won't have any way of falsifying the shares submitted.

B) I will take a unit home that evening, disassemble and take more robust pictures.  I will NOT be removing any heat sinks, however. 

C) I will do further testing that evening on my own with a packet analyzer to see  what packets are being transmitted, when and where they are going and coming from.

That's the plan as of right now, at any rate.

  A) Sounds awesome. I had not given much thought to the idea of being able to falsify shares with remote means as well as onboard. Thats pretty thorough methodology you have detailed and for thinking of such possibilities.

  B) rock on, the ones you've shown so far are not bad. They certainly give the impression that the PCB is not as cheap as one would think either. Any insight on the etched out portion?

  C) very nice to hear!

  Hopefully they toss a few units your way for your time. As excited as some are of the prospect of a review/demo it ultimatly only benefits them.. =)


   Cheers

[runeks]

[...] This thing looks to be seriously overdesigned! If they'd just added a cheap Ethernet PHY and port, it would have more than enough processing grunt to connect directly to a pool by itself and mine standalone with no computer.

As far as I can tell that would require a lot more software work. Like building a program for the Atmel chip that fetches work. I think this would, somewhat, be a waste of time, as this is what ckolivas has spent so much time perfecting with cgminer. Also, is there a TCP/IP implementation for this Atmel chip even? Or how'd they actually send packets with the PHY, let alone run a mining application on the board?

[gmaxwell]

The demo plan is that I will:
A) connect it to a non-routable development side of the pool, so that the box is unable to communicate with the internet.  I will then let it submit shares to the pool and I will have one of the getwork servers in debug mode and I will see what is sent out and what's sent back.  As I found no evidence of any wireless communications on the board, and since the computer it's connected to will not be on the internet, it won't have any way of falsifying the shares submitted.
B) I will take a unit home that evening, disassemble and take more robust pictures.  I will NOT be removing any heat sinks, however.  
C) I will do further testing that evening on my own with a packet analyzer to see  what packets are being transmitted, when and where they are going and coming from.
That's the plan as of right now, at any rate.

Please make sure at some point during the actual mining you run it on a power meter so you can get a measurement under actual mining load.

There are various ways to fake this sort of thing and match one of {rate,power} but not both. (e.g. you could use a big-fast-expensive FPGA to get 1GH/s, but if they did that they couldn't deliver on their advertised price)

[P4man]

Just to make sure the conspiracy theorists run out of ideas.. assuming they have several units, will they let you choose a unit at random?

[runeks]

IMO it's a bit pointless to try to prove, with the demonstration, that BFL didn't pack the board with some expensive chips to make it look like they achieved the $/MH figure they did. Only with time will we get more and more certain whether this is the case or not.

Conspiracy theorists will never run out of ideas.

[eldentyrell]

it seems a little silly since that knowledge will become public, assuming they hit their target ship dates

Nah, they've probably removed any silkscreening on the tops of the chips.  Bet they're blank underneath.  Don't count on learning anything from removing the heatsinks.  If they don't want you to know what used to be silkscreened there, it's only going to cost them a few pennies worth of solvent and about five seconds of additional assembly time.

[runeks]

For future reference, what is the best method to use for removing heatsinks that have been attached with thermal glue (instead of using thermal grease and holding them on with screws)?

If they used a good epoxy adhesive, you might never get them off. At least not without breaking the chips.

[notme]

[...] This thing looks to be seriously overdesigned! If they'd just added a cheap Ethernet PHY and port, it would have more than enough processing grunt to connect directly to a pool by itself and mine standalone with no computer.

As far as I can tell that would require a lot more software work. Like building a program for the Atmel chip that fetches work. I think this would, somewhat, be a waste of time, as this is what ckolivas has spent so much time perfecting with cgminer. Also, is there a TCP/IP implementation for this Atmel chip even? Or how'd they actually send packets with the PHY, let alone run a mining application on the board?

Not to mention network equipment is a lot more expensive than USB hubs/cables if you want to run a cluster of them.

[worldinacoin]

I think lets stop the guessing and let the real results show.  The conspiracy theories are getting more and more colorful.