Algorithmically placed FPGA miner: 255MH/s/chip, supports all known boards

[jamesg]

I'm willing to bet 100 BTC that ASICs will be the first mining hardware to be rendered useless by Bitcoin developers.

1. The core bitcoin developer team would only change the protocol if the entire community deemed it necessary.
2. If ASIC is brought out in a way to appeal to the masses, I do not see this happening.

I would be willing to take this bet any day of the week. No ASIC developer is going to want to destroy the hand that feeds them.

[cablepair]

I'm willing to bet 100 BTC that ASICs will be the first mining hardware to be rendered useless by Bitcoin developers.

1. The core bitcoin developer team would only change the protocol if the entire community deemed it necessary.
2. If ASIC is brought out in a way to appeal to the masses, I do not see this happening.

I would be willing to take this bet any day of the week. No ASIC developer is going to want to destroy the hand that feeds them.

Sometimes we are not able to decide the course of things, sometimes they just go a certain way and we have no control over it, sometimes the hand that feeds you gets bit regardless of how badly you dont want to destroy it.

and if you think the Bitcoin core devs make any big decisions based on what the "community deems necessary" you are dreaming and its time to wake up.

As far as the bet goes we need a date, which realistically this could happen in the next 1-2 years kind of long to make a bet dont you think?


I would welcome ASICs to the Bitcoin mining world if I thought that someone who wasnt motivated by greed was going to release one any time soon.

The thing with ASICs are this, realistically once you get passed the design and prototyping stage and you have something that works its very inexpensive to make these, we are talking about a couple dollars, a REALISTIC price for an ASIC chip - resale value is like $5-$10

Now lets just say that BFL's trade in program is completely legit, theres no small print.. if they are willing to give you a FULL refund value on a $600 item that has very little resale value for something that costs a few bucks to make. How much do you think they are going to be selling these ASICs for?

The answer is simple there.

Now what about wealthy private developers who have the money to design, prototype and manufacture their own ASICs?

51% of the Network could quite literally be purchased for probably less than what Gigavps's house is worth.


We TRULY need an OpenASIC initiative, something real and competitive. Otherwise it has the potential to get way out of control.

I dont mean to beat a dead horse here, I just want people to think before they sink everything into overpriced ASIC chips that have the potential to be rendered usesless later on down the line. ASICs can not adapt, we can change the software on our GPU/FPGA miners , but ASICs cannot, think about that before you spend a grand on something that cost a few bucks to make.

[Brunic]

Huge news. I'm happy to see that.

[DiabloD3]

BTW, change the title of the thread. Its no longer 245.

[cablepair]

Yes and just to get back on topic here I think tricone-mining is brilliant and what E.T. did here is amazing

This brings new life to FPGA miners. Our ModMiner Quad will now do over 1g/hash per unit and thats after the TLM commission.

Well done.

[sadpandatech]

Has anyone had the opportunity to try this on one of Enerpoint's fpga units yet?

[norulezapply]

Has anyone had the opportunity to try this on one of Enerpoint's fpga units yet?

Enterpoint is still working on getting a basic bitstream working first. Only a few developers have boards at the moment. This will come later

[sadpandatech]

Has anyone had the opportunity to try this on one of Enerpoint's fpga units yet?

Enterpoint is still working on getting a basic bitstream working first. Only a few developers have boards at the moment. This will come later

50 boards went out to those who asked for dev status. The question still stands. ;p

[cablepair]

Has anyone had the opportunity to try this on one of Enerpoint's fpga units yet?

Enterpoint is still working on getting a basic bitstream working first. Only a few developers have boards at the moment. This will come later

http://www.btcfpga.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=50

This miner is available now and will do over 1g/hash with this new TLM bitstream

[bitfoo]

This makes me want to buy some FPGAs. Nice work!

[BR0KK]

Nice work

When will i be able to use that on my Ztex Cluster ?

I downloaded the file but i actually have no clue how to use that (<-- I'm not a programmer)

[Entropy-uc]

ET,

Can you clarify what approxiamately 5% means? Imprecise language regarding money makes me nervous.

Also, how will you harvest this 5%?  If this becomes common practice how would I know some future bad actor doesn't take 5% and all valid blocks? Similarly how could you be sure a user doesn't proxy your hashes back to himself?  Or send them to dev/null?. You signature server is going to be a huge denial of service target. Will you compensate miners for downtime?

It is a fascinating idea. Do you follow behavioral economics?

Strike through on items in the FAQ.

[Inspector 2211]

By the way, I don't believe that EldenTyrell modifies the INPUT of the double-SHA.
Changing even one input bit will change all output bits in a non-trivial, seemingly stochastic, way.
After all, this is the very idea of SHA-256.

What I, however, do believe, is: Once a "golden nonce" has been found, he encrypts it. Probably quite trivially,
as his professional pride would not permit him to add extra encryption stages and thus slow the miner down. Extra stages would also impact space and power consumption.

It may be some kind of fixed XOR mask, but that would be too trivial. Maybe an XOR mask that is based on the
32-bit counter or something. Maybe an adder plus an XOR mask. Something like that.

[TheSeven]

From what I read on his web site it seems like the jobs are what's getting signcrypted, not the golden nonces.

[Entropy-uc]

By the way, I don't believe that EldenTyrell modifies the INPUT of the double-SHA.
Changing even one input bit will change all output bits in a non-trivial, seemingly stochastic, way.
After all, this is the very idea of SHA-256.

What I, however, do believe, is: Once a "golden nonce" has been found, he encrypts it. Probably quite trivially,
as his professional pride would not permit him to add extra encryption stages and thus slow the miner down. Extra stages would also impact space and power consumption.

It may be some kind of fixed XOR mask, but that would be too trivial. Maybe an XOR mask that is based on the
32-bit counter or something. Maybe an adder plus an XOR mask. Something like that.

Probably a key with the incoming job that is tested and then convoluted to produce the outgoing transform?

It makes me sad thinking of all the time he spent on this code, and the time he will spend keeping the server up that could have been spent on a better bitstream. There needs to be an open mechanism to compensate bitstream work and encourage collaborative improvements.

[bulanula]

Love the effort from the guy but I think we all know that it is going to get leaked without the commission at some point.

Same with digital copy of magazine ...

Piracy in inevitable. I think he should have sold it off initially rather than take a constant 5% cut but that is just me.

[rjk]

Love the effort from the guy but I think we all know that it is going to get leaked without the commission at some point.

Same with digital copy of magazine ...

Piracy in inevitable. I think he should have sold it off initially rather than take a constant 5% cut but that is just me.

He states in his FAQ that it is possible to reverse-engineer the bitstream from the device, but that the effort to do so would require as much or more knowledge of how it worked as it took to create it in the first place, and therefore the effort would be best directed at just creating it again from scratch.

And assuming he is using robust proxies like he states he is (google and amazon), that makes the DDoS a bit less feasible. Finally, if he is using proper open encryption techniques that have been proven, and not falling into the trap of "roll-your-own" failure, it has a very likely chance of success.

[Garr255]

TheSeven: You will probably have to agree to make a closed source MPBM build which includes support for this firmware...

I think the idea of the commission is great, but I really wonder how many people it will turn off, because of the need for tweaked software.

[Keninishna]

Another thing is what if bitfury gets the same idea and they release their 300 mh/s bitstream with 5% comission. No point in using a slower bitstream. Or even an improved open source bitstream that goes faster than 260 mh/s.

[bitfury]

First, my congratulations to EldenTyrell! Good luck to his project!

Another thing is what if bitfury gets the same idea and they release their 300 mh/s bitstream with 5% comission. No point in using a slower bitstream. Or even an improved open source bitstream that goes faster than 260 mh/s.

I will not do that as mine bitstream would not work with any board around there... not enough power for it and future version... So for existing spartan board I am not competitor to his bitstream niche.

But that nice is not too big, I expect that there's about 1000 more spartan chips in circulations... totaling about 1655 with our 655 thing. our question is more like - how to deploy 10'000 more spartans, not how to compete for 1000 spartans lying around.