Topic: [Archive] BFL trolling museum - page 124. (Read 69394 times)

If the PW was just hashed once, you could always just hash it again to get a double hashed version of the PW to feed the chip. You lose half the efficiency compared to if you weren't double hashing, but it would still be alot better than any other system.

twice.

I'm going to guess not useful at all, unless the passwords happen to be hashed with SHA2.

So I wonder how easily this could be reconfigured into a "fuck rainbow tables, crack passwords in realtime" type appliance. 1 bitcoin terahash per second is 2 regular SHA256 terahashes per second, which is a lot...

WOW!

Read more carefully. The most profitable approach is to sell units en masse while quietly building up a larger cache of personal units. The fact that they profit from selling units to customers in no way implies that they cannot profit from turning these units into paperweights after the market is saturated. That is what I would do.

They announced that the trade-ins will be dollar-for-dollar (can't find the post atm). So 1 Bitforce Single =/= 1 Bitforce Single SC. In fact it's more of a 2 to 1 deal. (FPGA version = $600, ASIC version = $1300)

Oh fuck off Bulanula.  You and the rest of the brain deads said the exact same thing about the FPGAs when BFL announced them.  And you all looked like idiots in the end didn't you.

I'd have thought you lot would have learnt by now but I obviously underestimated your level of retardation.

... as I said before ... unless there is a reason why it needs to be/must be changed ...
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.967195

Smartest thing I have read on here.. Anyone could have posted this. The cup holder idea looks like it came from the new pic BF posted on their main page...

Wasn't Vladmir planning to fill a whole datacenter with ASICs, and still only have 5-8Th/s or so? Wonder how many times his big investors have crapped their pants today, since BFL's flagship product is supposedly specced to provide that much hash power in 5-8 compact units.

Why are some people seemingly under the impression that ASICs are 'evil' or 'a problem'? ASICs are not the boogeyman. They will be used for mining, just like FPGAs are this year, just like GPUs were last year, and just like CPUs were 2 years ago.

They are a natural evolution of an efficient solution for the proof-of-work problem that the bitcoin protocol presents. The fact that someone has the cajones to dump serious capital into development of something like this is evidence that bitcoin is thriving, in fact, growing. This is a good thing for all of us.

Yes, the large-scale deployment of ASICs will make GPU (and to a lesser extent, FPGA) mining obsolete. It will drive difficulty up to levels never seen before. That is, mining with GPUs and FPGAs will no longer be profitable. So what? Just like the arrival of GPU mining en-mass heralded the demise of CPU miners. So what? We either chose to embrace ASICs as miners, or we take our profits and GTFO of the mining scene.

What may happen is that when ASICs are deployed en-mass, the 'average miner' will have a farm that has 20x the hashrate of what they currently have. So instead of a 5Ghps miner being the 'average', it will be a 100Ghps miner. If that miner has $4k worth of GPU/FPGAs now, he can choose to 'upgrade' and buy $4k worth of ASICs. The difficulty will be 20x what it is now, so 30M instead of 1.5M. Bitcoins will still be $6 (they will still be generated at the same rate so supply remains the same).

And this all means that mining profits for the previously mentioned 'average miner' with $4k worth of 100Ghps ASICs will remain the same as they are now. If he is making 3BTC a day with his $4k 5Ghps rig now, he will continue to make 3BTC a day with his $4k 100Ghps ASIC rig. Nothing changes.

This is 'evil' or 'a problem' how? It is only a problem for those who are currently invested in GPUs and FPGAs and who don't want to change. Change or die. That's how it's always been. It was the case with the CPU-to-GPU transition, and we are seeing the beginnings of it now with the GPU-to-FPGA transistion, and we have already been warned that an FPGA-to-ASIC transition is looming. No one is forcing us to continue mining, but many of us will.

But setting it up is half the fun! Ok more like 70%...

You will still be capable of mining with GPUs for quite some time. Even long enough to pay off those GPUs, I think. I am definitely ordering some of these ASICs, but I'm also going to be buying more GPUs, as I think there will be plenty of time before these cause the *difficulty explosion of 2013* that make GPUs unprofitable to mine.

*TM

Modification of the protocol requires that the majority of hashing power approve of the change. What percentage of hashing power is now tied to people with a vested interested in keeping BFL going, and what percentage will that be once this HW is in the wild?
If BFL sells 11 MiniRig SCs, even if no one else drops out BFL SC hardware will be 1/2 the network and there's no way the protocol will be changed to obsolete the ASICs.

Of course if the bfl Asic became too much of a problem one could modify bitcoin protocol just enough so that the ASIC doesn't work or is severely hampered. They are very specific. A fpga can be reprogrammed. An ASIC would be nothing more than a coffee warmer then, literally.

The point is the same as their announcements have always been. To get customers to fund their development of new products and to prevent people from buying any competitor's products.

NRE becomes a sunk cost. It doesnt factor in your pricing strategy after you spent it. BFL will not adjust its pricing in either direction depending on whether or nor they have already recovered it, they will price their hardware purely to make as much as possible. They are not a non profit organization.

Will they recover it? If they are the first asic provider on the market and maintain an asic monopoly for 12 months or more, I think easily and many times over.  If several ASIC providers would emerge in a short time frame triggering a price war, well, potentially none of them will recover their NRE.

Ok, then.  Let's consider an open, community funded ASIC solution.  How does the problem change then?  I would think it's much less risky.

Until we see something on their website or a real confirmation.  We should assume this may be fake.

P4man.  IMO, it's pretty clear that, NRE aside, cost to produce a SC Single is at least $1000 below what's stated in their announcement.  It's also clear that BFL will easily recover the NRE.

What situation are we left with?  For example, how much of that $1000 would an early adopter have to eat while BFL is lowering price due to difficulty spikes over, let's say, a 6 month period.

I guess what is the potential depreciation 6 months after launch of SC models.  Will BFL still be under pressure to recover NRE at that point and resist price drops.  I suppose time will only tell.