Topic: 1GH/s, 20w, $500 — Butterflylabs, is it a scam? - page 29. (Read 123109 times)

^ And Bets of Bitcoin will decide supremely when this "proof" became official?
And, I presume, will be able to retroactively cancel bets after this point in time?

Yes, exactly. Only the bets that are put on after the "proof" will be canceled.

Wait, I'm confused. If it turns out to not be a scam and they prove it next week, the "disagree" bets will be winners and they will be paid, right?

Nice, good to see betsofbitco.in is keeping an eye on this.

If that happens (as it happened before for some other statements) we stop betting, cancel and refund the bets after a certain date when the conclusion is reached. Using our best judgement is part of our referee job even if everything is not perfectly stated in the submitted statement.

I hope the time-weighting will correct for the poorly formulated bet.

But its a stupid formulated bet. What happens if they ship next week? Everyone could still bet for weeks to come while the outcome would already be certain. The only ones that can win are the ones voting its a scam.

Bet on this topic at our site has just reached 110 BTC. It is a great deal, especially if you think that units will ship this year.

HAI GUISE I GOT 1 AND IT WORKZ LOL!!!111!!!!1!


But seriously, sub'd to thread because I'm interested to know what kind of hardware they've used.

I think you are in the right place for the announcement.

6 days to go... tick, tock, tock 

Okay, all is right with the world.

I thought you were in the obvious scam group!

I have already ordered like 10. Hope you don't beat me. You know there are only 100 available. Pre order NOW !!!

I'm fully with you that when sold on the open market they command premium prices.

But BFL seems to be a loft operation (and I don't know how loft in Kansas City compares to a garage in Silicon Valley, I presume they are about the same.) They may have gotten some engineering samples, some partially defective chips. They may have bought out from the bankruptcy assets of some networking equipment vendor who just lost their contract with the government of Egypt or Libya. Who knows? Speculation in this thread is a free fun.

I don't think any VPN accelerator has sufficient throughput to achieve the kind performance necessary given their cost.  It is an interesting re-use method of looking for more efficient hashing though.  I did some quick research and VPN accelerators tend to have high cost relative to their performance.  Certainly nothing that would be inline with the MH/$ claims made by the scammers.

That's an interesting idea.  Now if that's not what they're doing, you've just given away a good idea.

IPSec VPN accelerators are designed with 3 5 objectives:
1) max PPS - packets per second, each packet requiring HMAC-hash which computes 2*hash for short byte-strings.
2) max flows - each packet flow uses different keys, chip minimizes required key reloading
3) max BPS - bytes per second, this is the least important objective, total throughput is the easiest to achieve and normally least important because it very rarely becomes a true limit of the whole design. This is where VPN accelerators differ from other designs: unlike pretty much everything else they do a lot of short-string hashes not a few long-string hashes.
4) min latency - do not require batching of packets for efficient work and no additional waits after each packet
5) testability - being able to do self-test while still operating, not only upon reboot.

I'm not aware of anyone selling individual VPN acceleration chips. Those things are usually sold as systems, and will typically require an NDA to get internal details. But the overall feel of those designs is that they provide lots of leeway to the driver-writers and digital designers: most of the combinations of control signals and registers are "reserved; do no use", "for internal test only" and so forth.

I'm actually not at all in the business, I got interested because of an effort to understand some historical project that went bankrupt.

No, people have pointed this out _many times before_, including in this thread, I'm sure.

1MH/s ~= 1 GBit/sec of SHA256 hashing.  There is no commercial application for a mining-speed SHA256 engine.