ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It

[KS]

Ok - the original comment was referring to the implied connection between electricity prices and mining feasibility. This is too simplistic. This assumes that there are no infrastructural barriers between the construction site and deployment site for bitcoin hardware.

OK

However, I postulate that new hardware "migrates" from easily accessible deployment sites to energy efficient ones. As such, hardware lives along a gradient with a drift towards sites with cheap electricity, where the forces pushing are bitcoin price developments and advances in bitcoin mining IT, to name two. (Thus the analogy to steady state systems). While bitcoin price is a somewhat reversible process, bitcoin mining IT is not.

As usual, it "depends". If it were an efficient system where only the high cost electricity zones would deploy the new hardware generations, you could probably maintain a decent amount of asic generations operating between the high and low cost electricity zones (a new generation could push the current one to a lower cost zone). But this would assume no new generation is deployed directly in the low cost zones.

I would think everyone investing significant amounts will tend to operate in the lower/lowest costs zones, so it would skew the system dramatically (and the "steady state" could only work with few generations of asics).

But is a "semi steady state" really a "steady state"?

What this likely means for mining equipment providers is that in the intermediate term the ability to migrate and maintain beats efficiency. That's why developments by Allied Control are so interesting which focus on ease of deployment.

Here you're opening a whole new can of worms. I think that would depends on your OPEX. CAPEX is high with the tanks but if maintenance (OPEX) is low enough, it would be a decent target for countries where labor and space are expensive (but what of electricity costs, what of heat dissipation power usage?). If OTOH you have cheap labor and space, the tanks aren't looking that good anymore.

Also, unless there is a way to stack them, they won't really help you improve the density of your deployment (they have other issues with connectors, plumbing, etc) vs a regular datacenter (more on that after the end of June, I guess). I'm not really sold on the tanks, I think the idea is neat, but the numbers don't convince me so far (probably need more data).

[necro_nemesis]

Here's a real world example where three S1's are consuming a total of 500w hashing at 140gh/s each:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=526060.0

What about it? bitmain always advertised up to 0.68w/gh.

Can you see past your simple arithmetic for a moment and understand it's the principle being demonstrated in the example?

Now let's go further using the principle. If you're making your own ASICs you're paying somewhere in the neighborhood of the square root of dirt. Got that math? If the relationship between power and performance is not linear then there's potentially a sweet spot somewhere below where you flex your muscles and advertise your ASICs at when you're attempting to sell each one for top dollar. If you're building say, 23p of mining facilities that you're not flogging on eBay when you think you're done with it; you're going to build it to work for you as long as possible. Who's to say 11.52 Gh/s is the sweet spot when we don't have the other numbers? It may be a good point for RM to operate his first equipment based on his profit margins at the time his equipment will hit market but it's a snapshot in a much longer time line.

[jimmothy]

Here's a real world example where three S1's are consuming a total of 500w hashing at 140gh/s each:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=526060.0

What about it? bitmain always advertised up to 0.68w/gh.

Can you see past your simple arithmetic for a moment and understand it's the principle being demonstrated in the example?

Now let's go further using the principle. If you're making your own ASICs you're paying somewhere in the neighborhood of the square root of dirt. Got that math? If the relationship between power and performance is not linear then there's potentially a sweet spot somewhere below where you flex your muscles and advertise your ASICs at when you're attempting to sell each one for top dollar. If you're building say, 23p of mining facilities that you're not flogging on eBay when you think you're done with it; you're going to build it to work for you as long as possible. Who's to say 11.52 Gh/s is the sweet spot when we don't have the other numbers? It may be a good point for RM to operate his first equipment based on his profit margins at the time his equipment will hit market but it's a snapshot in a much longer time line.

What are you talking about?

What exactly does bitmain chips meeting advertised specs prove?

[necro_nemesis]

It proves that when market forces are in place to run an ASIC inefficiently it will be run inefficiently. Reduce the impact of the cost of the ASIC and your considerations as to where to optimally run it changes. The cost of building power supplies to run it,  the space required to locate it and the measures required to cool it all change. For all we know this could be a very efficient ASIC at lower power which isn't the end of the world given what's planned to go into mining and franchising but we don't know.

[jimmothy]

It proves that when market forces are in place to run an ASIC inefficiently it will be run inefficiently. Reduce the impact of the cost of the ASIC and your considerations as to where to optimally run it changes.

Your bitmain example doesn't prove that every asic is capable of significantly higher efficiency than advertised without diminishing returns. In fact it doesn't even prove that bitmain can beat 0.68w/gh.

[necro_nemesis]

You're interests in simply disagreeing for the sake of making arguments is your own undoing of having an understanding. Yes jimmothy the sky isn't blue.

[jimmothy]

You're interests in simply disagreeing for the sake of making arguments is your own undoing of having an understanding. Yes jimmothy the sky isn't blue.

You are talking nonsense. Why waste mine and everyones elses time with your lengthy overcomplicated comments.

Nobody disagreed that bitmain chips could acheive up to 0.68w/gh. So why provide us with an example of bitmain chips hashing at 0.8w/gh?

The topic for debate is: can every current gen asic be underclocked/volted to acheive significant gains in efficiency below what was advertised? (Without diminishing returns)

[necro_nemesis]

Possibly due to you're oversimplified conclusions being incorrect judging by your statements.

[jimmothy]

Possibly due to you're oversimplified conclusions being incorrect judging by your statements.

My "oversimplified" conclusion that nobody has yet to demonstrate an asic working significantly beyond advertised efficiency is why you brought up an example of bitmain not surpassing advertised efficiency? Thanks for supporting my point.

Again if I'm incorrect ease provide a single shred of evidence that suggests it is possible to undervolt every asic significantly below advertised limit without diminishing returns.

[klondike_bar]

Either you cant read a chart or you are assuming current asics run at a point to the extreme left of that chart

Yes this is exactly what I am assuning due to the fact that no asic manufacturer has advertised below 0.5w/gh (bitfury excluded) and nobody has been able to significantly undervolt below advertised limit.

which would also imply those other asics can be overclocked by factor of 2-3x. Here is hint: almost none can. KnC, HF, CT, bitmain, Bitmine .. you'd be lucky to hit advertised speeds, let alone 2-3x more.

Either way, welcome to my ignore list.

Heres a hint:

knc can be overclocked 1.7 times  (700gh/s vs advertised 40gh/s)
Hashfast can be overclocked 2 times (800gh/s vs 400gh advertised)
And bitmain can be overclocked 2 times (200gh vs 100gh advertised)

All of which have no problem hashing at advertised speeds.

Again, got any evidence that other manufacturers are not on the far left side of that chart?

Bitmain advertises 180GH. it can overclock to to ~205GH

[jimmothy]

Bitmain advertises 180GH. it can overclock to to ~205GH

180gh is after bitmain overclocked the chips.

Since day 1 they advertised 1.5gh per chip at 0.68w/gh before they overclocked to 3gh per chip at 1.2w/gh.

[necro_nemesis]

Again if I'm incorrect ease provide a single shred of evidence that suggests it is possible to undervolt every asic significantly below advertised limit without diminishing returns.

Why am I being asked to go through the exercise of providing evidence to prove something I didn't claim? If you go back to what I stated we don't know the overall performance numbers of the chip and was requesting these values. I didn't claim that for "every asic" and for that matter more specifically the BE200 could benefit from the reduction as we simply don't have the evidence to do so yet. I also didn't ever infer that hash rate remained the same when under volting and under clocking.

[xhomerx10]

Caveat Emptor!  Information asymmetry detected.

ITs not meant as promotion for BFL, Id be the last person to suggest you order anything from there. But the chart is interesting and relevant to earlier discussions about how you can scale power efficiency of every ASIC. Even if you take those numbers with a table spoon of salt, it nicely illustrates my point.  There is about a factor 3x difference in power efficiency depending what voltage/frequency point you pick. That spread is not going to be vastly different for any other bitcoin asic.

 I'm going to pretend it is relevant and probably valid for other ASICs but the fact of the matter is, the price of the devices are set many months before those cute little graphics come out.  Your money has been spent and if the device you spent it on wont make a positive return for you running at the right-hand side of the graph, it certainly wont make money running on the left-hand side.  Ergo,  the plot is meaningless to anyone but the salesman and the scientist.
 Maybe I am missing something.  What do you think your options are now that you have this information?

[Puppet]

Caveat Emptor!  Information asymmetry detected.

ITs not meant as promotion for BFL, Id be the last person to suggest you order anything from there. But the chart is interesting and relevant to earlier discussions about how you can scale power efficiency of every ASIC. Even if you take those numbers with a table spoon of salt, it nicely illustrates my point.  There is about a factor 3x difference in power efficiency depending what voltage/frequency point you pick. That spread is not going to be vastly different for any other bitcoin asic.

 I'm going to pretend it is relevant and probably valid for other ASICs but the fact of the matter is, the price of the devices are set many months before those cute little graphics come out.  Your money has been spent and if the device you spent it on wont make a positive return for you running at the right-hand side of the graph, it certainly wont make money running on the left-hand side.  Ergo,  the plot is meaningless to anyone but the salesman and the scientist.
 Maybe I am missing something.  What do you think your options are now that you have this information?

You're missing the fact there is/was a discussion going about scaling of power efficiency.  For every asic you could draw a similar plot, and power efficiency can be traded for performance per chip. Something obvious to anyone who knows anything thing about asics, but apparently impossible to grasp for jimmothy.  As for pricing, current market prices are so far detached from variable production cost, that for now, this is a moot point. Vendors will charge whatever fools are willing to pay, there is basically no correlation with production costs yet. That will only happen once price per GH has dropped another order of magnitude or so.

As for my "options". The only sensible option is the same one since the very first asic was announced: stay away from them, just invest in bitcoin. Doing that has yielded me 100% BTC denomnated ROI or ~10000% when expressed in dollar. How many miners can say that?

[jimmothy]

For every asic you could draw a similar plot, and power efficiency can be traded for performance per chip. Something obvious to anyone who knows anything thing about asics, but apparently impossible to grasp for jimmothy.

Of course you can draw a similar plot with every asic.

I never debated that.

You are arguing that every asic is capable of higher efficiency than any point on the plot.

So either you are assuming that the asic manufacturers were too lazy/incompetent to do proper testing to create their plot, or they decided to not advertise their max efficiency.

[Puppet]

"Again you need evidence that lowering voltage to increase efficiency is possible"

 Quod est demonstrandum. Back to ignore.

[jimmothy]

"Again you need evidence that lowering voltage to increase efficiency is possible"

 Quod est demonstrandum. Back to ignore.

You still have yet to prove any asic works below advertised minimum voltage. Let alone undervolted enough to be twice as efficient as advertised.

You also have yet to explain why knc/hashfast/cointerra would refuse to advertise their chips full capabilities.

[necro_nemesis]

At some point you'll realize that your valiant efforts to calculate best value are fruitless. Miner's are being given only what little incentive they need to purchase and there will come a time if you're to stand a chance you must align yourself with ASIC makers if you're to remain in mining at all. You either invest in BTC or you invest in the mining equipment manufacturers. Sooner or later the little guy is out.

[klondike_bar]

At some point you'll realize that your valiant efforts to calculate best value are fruitless. Miner's are being given only what little incentive they need to purchase and there will come a time if you're to stand a chance you must align yourself with ASIC makers if you're to remain in mining at all. You either invest in BTC or you invest in the mining equipment manufacturers. Sooner or later the little guy is out.

bullsh*t. big miners will be taxed. The little guy can run a few kW of equipment without being taxed as a bitcoin business - so the hashrate will always be able to distribute.

even in GPU days there were people with warehouses and attics crammed full of GPUs

[topminingcontracts]

Bitmain advertises 180GH. it can overclock to to ~205GH

180gh is after bitmain overclocked the chips.

Since day 1 they advertised 1.5gh per chip at 0.68w/gh before they overclocked to 3gh per chip at 1.2w/gh.

My two cents, Antminer S2 uses the same ASIC as Antminer S1

Antminer S1 = 2 W x GH = 2.8 GH x Chip = 180 GH with 64 Chips
Antminer S2 = 1 W x GH = 1.6 GH x Chip = 1000 GH with 640 Chips

Regards

Juan