A bitcoin miner in every hand - page 6.

brontosaurus

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Quote from: Zelek Uther on May 20, 2015, 04:59:18 PM

Quote from: Biodom on May 20, 2015, 02:55:50 PM

As it stands, I was saddened to find out that we were basically losing money or barely breaking even with 0.5-0.7w/Gh miners during 2014-2015 while 21 inc were mining at 0.22w/GH

Taken from http://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin-mining-strategy/

Quote

Intel factories, the documents suggested, were responsible for at least two generations of 21 bitcoin mining chips, a 0.57 w/GH 22nm FinFET chip (codenamed CyrusOne) and a 0.22 w/GH 22nm chip (codenamed Brownfield).

They are quoting 0.22 J/GH at the ASIC chip level, not total system draw at the wall. Competitor ASICS are fairly close, e.g. Spondoolies-Tech RockerBox at 0.35 J/GH (as featured in SP3X and SP20, see https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6519857).

And if Intel really did do those chips then they did a pretty shit job of it.

dogie

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Quote from: s1gs3gv on May 20, 2015, 10:27:41 AM

Quote from: dogie on May 20, 2015, 12:15:30 AM

Quote from: sidehack on May 19, 2015, 10:50:36 PM

Unless they make open pool choices, they become number 1. If they don't make open pool choices, they then have to convince everyone to spend that extra $8 initial and $1 per month in exchange for almost exactly nothing in return.

$1 a month might not sound like much, but put another way, who would "subscribe to the bitcoin network" for $12 a year? That doesn't sound like something that can be sold en-mass.

But buying $12/year of lottery tickets ? No problem. There are ways to structure compensation to the consumer that can make this work, even in the face of marginal mining economics.

They're not being offered $12/year of lottery tickets, they're being offered $12/year for $3 of bitcoin and a warm fuzzy feeling.

joeventura

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Public relations ploy

Waste of space.

Kyle1836

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This idea won't work. With current difficulty and technology, you wouldn't make anything worth while.

Zelek Uther

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Run a Bitcoin node.

Quote from: Biodom on May 20, 2015, 02:55:50 PM

As it stands, I was saddened to find out that we were basically losing money or barely breaking even with 0.5-0.7w/Gh miners during 2014-2015 while 21 inc were mining at 0.22w/GH

Taken from http://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin-mining-strategy/

Quote

Intel factories, the documents suggested, were responsible for at least two generations of 21 bitcoin mining chips, a 0.57 w/GH 22nm FinFET chip (codenamed CyrusOne) and a 0.22 w/GH 22nm chip (codenamed Brownfield).

They are quoting 0.22 J/GH at the ASIC chip level, not total system draw at the wall. Competitor ASICS are fairly close, e.g. Spondoolies-Tech RockerBox at 0.35 J/GH (as featured in SP3X and SP20, see https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6519857).

Biodom

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WSJ basically reiterates both pro- and con-arguments, suggesting that it just may be a paradigm shift (could also fizzle spectacularly).
amazon worked, but webvan didn't despite billions invested with star investors.

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/05/20/a-startups-radical-bet-on-bitcoin-mining-hinges-on-paradigm-shift-horizons/

Quote

If you believe that world is coming and, by extension, that both the usage and value of bitcoin will soar, 21′s plan could be the play of the century. But the recent history of bitcoin mining, where a falling bitcoin price and an arms race among developers of specialized mining chips, has left many with big doubts.

Tim Swanson, a consistently skeptical digital-currency consultant who makes a habit of challenging bitcoiners’ unbridled optimism, is unequivocal. 21′s plan is “a dumb idea,” he says, adding that “the investors deserve to get what’s coming to them.”
...
In response, a [21 inc] company spokeswoman said such criticism unreasonably assumed that the dollar price of bitcoin wouldn’t rise to offset the shrinking digital-currency payouts even though the network effects of its mass-adoption project should spur greater demand for bitcoin.

“You’d have to believe that 100 million new devices could be generating bitcoin continuously without any impact on the utility – hence on the price — for bitcoin,” she said. The spokeswoman cited how the price had soared from one cent a few years ago to around $230 now, even though the network hashing power and difficulty adjustment have also ratcheted much higher.

TheRealSteve

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FUN > ROI

Quote from: alh on May 20, 2015, 04:21:51 PM

If you think about it, both ASICMiner and Bitmain could have pursued the same approach. The BE100 was no more than 2-3 watts, and even the BM1380 couldn't have been terrible since it was the basis for the U1/U2 USB miner wasn't it?

Correct - and power used isn't that high if you plot it against people's yearly power use, expressed in dollars, etc. The Block Erupter USB and AntMiner U1 / U2 do get rather toasty, though... add that to a router that's already putting out a fair bit of heat (there's a reason for the giant vent holes in the top that make it easy for conductive things to fall into), and now your router needs active cooling Wink

Either running them slower or using a more efficient chip would work. But, as I've mentioned elsewhere (and others have said as well), they need to come up with a pretty good pitch to convince manufacturers to integrate and/or license their chip/tech... consumers aren't really the issue (short of some popular website raising a stink about Device X 'secretly' mining Bitcoins without actually digging into the numbers).

alh

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Quote from: sidehack on May 20, 2015, 04:05:05 PM

What's the typical power draw for a consumer-grade router? A couple watts? Probably 5-10 I'd guess, which probably means one good chip added to that could about double it. What's the power cost vs expected yield (or 25% of expected yield) for a 5W chip getting say 50GH over a three-year lifetime?

Are they advertising a service based around microtransactions? How do they propose to solve the problem, as mentioned earlier, of microtransactions overwhelming the protocol?

What service are they offering that is inherently benefited by integrating a hashing chip that pays the customer a fraction of its yield?

Novak and I both really don't see what they're doing that's actually any good, which means we both don't like it. Which, statistically, means it's going to be highly profitable for them.

My cynical response: None of the above questions were on the Power Point slides shown the Venture Capital guys. If you think about it, both ASICMiner and Bitmain could have pursued the same approach. The BE100 was no more than 2-3 watts, and even the BM1380 couldn't have been terrible since it was the basis for the U1/U2 USB miner wasn't it?

What would you be thinking now if Linksys had decided to integrate a BE100 into every one of their routers in the last 2 years? I think what's most innovative here is that 21e6 is getting their money from guys that have deep pockets, rather than a thousand pre-orders from customers (turned creditors/investors).

sidehack

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Curmudgeonly hardware guy

What's the typical power draw for a consumer-grade router? A couple watts? Probably 5-10 I'd guess, which probably means one good chip added to that could about double it. What's the power cost vs expected yield (or 25% of expected yield) for a 5W chip getting say 50GH over a three-year lifetime?

Are they advertising a service based around microtransactions? How do they propose to solve the problem, as mentioned earlier, of microtransactions overwhelming the protocol?

What service are they offering that is inherently benefited by integrating a hashing chip that pays the customer a fraction of its yield?

Novak and I both really don't see what they're doing that's actually any good, which means we both don't like it. Which, statistically, means it's going to be highly profitable for them.

brontosaurus

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Quote from: Meech on May 20, 2015, 02:21:55 PM

I believe the fine print stated that 75% of btc mined would go back to 21 inc. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You might well be correct but they really don't know how wrong things will turn out for them if they start believing that.

Do they think all the companies that pioneered mining chips are a bunch of idiots?

RoadStress

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Quote from: dogie on May 20, 2015, 12:15:30 AM

Quote from: sidehack on May 19, 2015, 10:50:36 PM

Unless they make open pool choices, they become number 1. If they don't make open pool choices, they then have to convince everyone to spend that extra $8 initial and $1 per month in exchange for almost exactly nothing in return.

$1 a month might not sound like much, but put another way, who would "subscribe to the bitcoin network" for $12 a year? That doesn't sound like something that can be sold en-mass.

They are not advertising it as that. They are betting on the incentive to get rid of ads or buying extra mobile data for their phones and the micropayments. Pay attention please.

Quote from: sidehack on May 20, 2015, 03:10:11 PM

That's great, for the phone where you get a ringtone out of it. What about everything else? What gimmick do they feed you to double the power consumption on your new wireless router?

Do you really think that they plan to sell routers that have double power requirements? I think that you are very wrong. It will be hard to design cases for those routers. They will want to keep this simple so they will add just a few extra W to them.

Biodom

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Quote from: sidehack on May 20, 2015, 03:10:11 PM

That's great, for the phone where you get a ringtone out of it. What about everything else? What gimmick do they feed you to double the power consumption on your new wireless router?

I agree there needs to be a change toward decentralization and mass adoption. That's good for everyone. But I don't see the practicality in charging people extra money to integrate miners into their devices and then pocket almost all of the returns. That's not actually decentralizing, it's just a new centralized model. I mean sure it distributes the hashpower, but one entity still controls the majority of the coins generated. Without user-configurable pools and payouts, they'd be supporting the economy more effectively by just buying that many dollars worth of existing coins instead of that many dollars worth of added mining chip and electricity cost.

I guess i am mostly agreeing anyway, but essentially, their model is similar with facebook, etc.
i don't think that they will ask you to pay extra (those $35 for USB , then $8 for router, then cents for cell phone chip-it is their cost).
Essentially, they want to entice you to use their services at essentially zero cost to you.
facebook basically entices you to look at ads. You get social interations, they get money from ads (and they should actually share some, but they don't-at least not yet)
In fact, some company superior to FB/goog/yahoo might want to share some ad $$ with consumers in the future through 21 inc bitcoin chip.

sidehack

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Curmudgeonly hardware guy

That's great, for the phone where you get a ringtone out of it. What about everything else? What gimmick do they feed you to double the power consumption on your new wireless router?

I agree there needs to be a change toward decentralization and mass adoption. That's good for everyone. But I don't see the practicality in charging people extra money to integrate miners into their devices and then pocket almost all of the returns. That's not actually decentralizing, it's just a new centralized model. I mean sure it distributes the hashpower, but one entity still controls the majority of the coins generated. Without user-configurable pools and payouts, they'd be supporting the economy more effectively by just buying that many dollars worth of existing coins instead of that many dollars worth of added mining chip and electricity cost.

Biodom

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average iphone uses $0.5/year of electricity for charging. Let's assume that, instead, it will use four times as much or $2/year.
So, you get 50c electricity use worth of mined bitcoin (could be ~$2) , some gimmick like a ringtone and 21inc gets $1.5 worth of your electricity or $6 worth of bitcoin.
You broke even, got bitcoin to play with, got a ringtone.
It will be acceptable to many, assuming that it is all spelled out properly when you sign a contract.
as far as basic math skills-those people are clearly in minority, and in addition, they also don't seem to care about supporting all those ad systems on the phone, which pretty much doubles it's power use.

The point is: centralized mining system of bitfury, KnC, Bitmain, upcoming Spondoolies did not work to increase bitcoin acceptance and cannot possibly work to achieve this in the future. The independent mining could work if there are energy efficient chips/machines for it that are/will be available to miners and are on par with the best of them.

As it stands, I was saddened to find out that we were basically losing money or barely breaking even with 0.5-0.7w/Gh miners during 2014-2015 while 21 inc were mining at 0.22w/GH

sidehack

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Curmudgeonly hardware guy

That right there makes the whole idea pretty much a disaster for any consumer, especially ones capable of simple math.

Meech

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I believe the fine print stated that 75% of btc mined would go back to 21 inc. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Biodom

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Quote from: alh on May 20, 2015, 01:55:58 PM

Quote from: Biodom on May 20, 2015, 01:16:07 PM

Quote from: jtoomim on May 20, 2015, 06:37:42 AM

21 Inc's business plan is brilliant.

[Some removed for brevity]

VCs understand this pitch. They see how huge this could be if it works. However, this pitch is not 21's business plan.

21's business plan is to engineer a convincing pitch, which they then present to VCs in order to get a ton of funding, which in turn they then use to design and fab their own ASIC using the world's best microprocessor fabs (Intel's), and then build multi-MW datacenters which they use to self-mine. The VCs and shareholders would not have ordinarily invested in mining, but when they see revenue coming in, they won't think too much about where it's coming from.

So far, it looks like they've been succeeding.

it might be, considering that we were happy to use 0.5-0.7w/GH equipment from Spond and bitmain while they (21 inc) were flying on 0.22w/Gh
I now start to think that a significant portion of "other" in pools was 21 inc

In addition, accumulating and then selling a large number of bitcoins without creating a large market is meaningless by itself or even damaging as KnC and Bitfury has shown during 2014-early 2015.
The advantage of 21inc approach is that many people will have some bitcoin that they might/will spend, creating a much bigger market (enriching 21 inc investors in the meanwhile, of course, but this is fine).

I highlighted a different part of jtoomim's message, which I think is the most likely scenario.

If on the other hand, you believe the "Massive Internet of Things" plan, I still don't see how it helps Bitcoin acceptance. The amount of Bitcoins which most folks would garner from their 20GH that they paid dearly for in electricity costs, will be difficult to exchange (I need a wallet?), and will yield only a pittance in terms of fiat they can actually spend. Does a million folks, each with .1 BTC, really move the needle on Bitcoin acceptance?

as i mentioned, what you highlighted was already done by KnC and bitfury without ANY positive influence on bitcoin acceptance or use. This is not a winning strategy, clearly. You can't use something that you don't readily have. I don't know about a million, but 10-100 million will certainly move the needle. We have ~ a billion of android phones being sold/year and ~250 mil of Apple's

alh

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Quote from: Biodom on May 20, 2015, 01:16:07 PM

Quote from: jtoomim on May 20, 2015, 06:37:42 AM

21 Inc's business plan is brilliant.

[Some removed for brevity]

VCs understand this pitch. They see how huge this could be if it works. However, this pitch is not 21's business plan.

21's business plan is to engineer a convincing pitch, which they then present to VCs in order to get a ton of funding, which in turn they then use to design and fab their own ASIC using the world's best microprocessor fabs (Intel's), and then build multi-MW datacenters which they use to self-mine. The VCs and shareholders would not have ordinarily invested in mining, but when they see revenue coming in, they won't think too much about where it's coming from.

So far, it looks like they've been succeeding.

it might be, considering that we were happy to use 0.5-0.7w/GH equipment from Spond and bitmain while they (21 inc) were flying on 0.22w/Gh
I now start to think that a significant portion of "other" in pools was 21 inc

In addition, accumulating and then selling a large number of bitcoins without creating a large market is meaningless by itself or even damaging as KnC and Bitfury has shown during 2014-early 2015.
The advantage of 21inc approach is that many people will have some bitcoin that they might/will spend, creating a much bigger market (enriching 21 inc investors in the meanwhile, of course, but this is fine).

I highlighted a different part of jtoomim's message, which I think is the most likely scenario.

If on the other hand, you believe the "Massive Internet of Things" plan, I still don't see how it helps Bitcoin acceptance. The amount of Bitcoins which most folks would garner from their 20GH that they paid dearly for in electricity costs, will be difficult to exchange (I need a wallet?), and will yield only a pittance in terms of fiat they can actually spend. Does a million folks, each with .1 BTC, really move the needle on Bitcoin acceptance?

Biodom

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Quote from: jtoomim on May 20, 2015, 06:37:42 AM

21 Inc's business plan is brilliant.

A common problem with the modern electronics economy is that most transactions are made for a product. Customers pay once, and they pay before they know how useful the product is actually going to be to them. This means that they systematically overpay for crappy products and underpay for solid, useful products with long useful lifetimes. Many companies have tried to deal with this problem by switching over to a subscription-based model instead, but consumers often resist that idea because they don't like it when someone else owns and controls the things they use and rely on. 21's pitch is a way to allow subscription-type revenue streams while still offering consumers complete ownership of their device.

VCs understand this pitch. They see how huge this could be if it works. However, this pitch is not 21's business plan.

21's business plan is to engineer a convincing pitch, which they then present to VCs in order to get a ton of funding, which in turn they then use to design and fab their own ASIC using the world's best microprocessor fabs (Intel's), and then build multi-MW datacenters which they use to self-mine. The VCs and shareholders would not have ordinarily invested in mining, but when they see revenue coming in, they won't think too much about where it's coming from.

So far, it looks like they've been succeeding.

it might be, considering that we were happy to use 0.5-0.7w/GH equipment from Spond and bitmain while they (21 inc) were flying on 0.22w/Gh
I now start to think that a significant portion of "other" in pools was 21 inc

In addition, accumulating and then selling a large number of bitcoins without creating a large market is meaningless by itself or even damaging as KnC and Bitfury has shown during 2014-early 2015.
The advantage of 21inc approach is that many people will have some bitcoin that they might/will spend, creating a much bigger market (enriching 21 inc investors in the meanwhile, of course, but this is fine).

alh

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As I've read things, this "Mining USB Charging Hub" is supposed to be somewhere now, or at least prototypes right? Or is the Q1 mean Q1 of 2016? I don't know how many of you have a "Charging Hub", but who's going to go to the trouble an Ethernet cable to that surprising RJ45 jack on the side, that's not present on any other "Charging Hub"? If it has a WiFi built-in, unless and until I "configure" it, it will have to hope that one of my neighbors in range has an unsecured WiFi network to sponge off of.

Don't you think even the VC guys will want to see the first "product" they are supposed to produce?

I actually think that jtoomim's analysis is right on, and that the "Internet of Things" is just a sideshow to secure funding.

Topic: A bitcoin miner in every hand - page 6. (Read 8153 times)