Topic: Bitfury: "16nm... sales to public start shortly" - page 43. (Read 108494 times)

Here's my take on the cost:

The hashing engine is so small that one could get it developed and samples manufactured for free in the small corner of some bigger project. The mega-dollar capital outlay would be required only in the final stage of mass-production. The semiconductor foundries routinely "waste" much more chip real estate on various testing structures.

So why nobody did that? My limited experience shows that the prospective market is so filled out with liars, bullshit artists, con men, mythomaniacs and associated naïfs (that are honest, but completely indistinguishable for the former classes) that  it is completely not worth the effort. The only way to do it is as an intellectual curiosity (in secret) or when from the start you plan on ripping off the fools.

Please don't go blaming the messenger. This is the reality. I'm not going to claim that I know everyone in the Bitcoin milieu. But I've known enough to come up with some generalizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_fabrication_plant

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a-custom-asic-made


I had those links bookmarked in water fox i forgot about i have a few videos i found on utube that explains a lot, i sub to .

If a rig was designed and manufactured with [for example] 100 x 16nm chips, that would be 1,000 rigs each month for 100k quantities a month.

How much per chip do you think would be your estimate if we were able to get the 100k per month.

Also, I'm sure they would want us to purchase 100k/month for a certain length of time.  Would it be like 6 months minimum or 12 months?

I'm just trying to get an idea for the cost of the chips alone over a certain length of time (6 months to 12 months).

Well, the answer to your rhetorical question is now obvious: NO.

This is a high technology endeavor: armies of electrical technicians, screwdriver artists and soldering masters can't overcome the advantage of a single logic design engineer backed with appropriate design toolset and the capital to manufacture it.

The last chances for "community effort" was in the FPGA era. They didn't work out.

Bunch of tightwads, skinflints and associated naïfs don't make a "community". They are just fodder to be exploited by the more knowledgeable.

The reality of electronic industry (in general) and coin mining niche (in particular) is brutal to some. I would just call it "normal", "typical" to any technological endeavors.

my mistake misunderstood .

I sent you a PM but you, NotFuzzyWarm, and 2112 have basically answered my question.

Bummer...   Damn damn damn damn...

Thanks for your input.

You thought correctly. I don't do chip design, I'm purely a hardware guy. However, most of the companies my company supports *are* in the semi industry ergo my knowledge of where the chip mfg processes comes from. Our end of things is tightly integrated to what size nodes the Foundries can produce.

That said, I can tell you it is a fact that you are looking at several million $ to develop a chip from scratch. Even when using foundry or design house supplied pre-made IP blocks, TSMC will not even talk to you about 16nm chips unless the chip quantities are over 100k/month...  Push back to 20-22nm and higher and they are much more approachable but that is also outside our target.

I know nothing about chip design. I'd lean on NotFuzzyWarm and 2112, guys like that, for proper silicon. As it is, all I can do is try and design boards around existing chips. Hopefully the Bitfury chip is still worth working with once it's actually available.

I think Bitfury is talking about their next group of wafers.  They obviously have deployed the first groups of wafers as they are now 18% of the hashrate.

Unless they just frantically hooked up hundreds of Petahashes of their older technology that was just sitting around right before they get their new chips, which makes little sense to me.

I only hope they plan on selling a big chunk of the next batch of wafers to the public and not keeping all that hashrate for themselves.

Nothing would be worse for bitcoin than thousands of home miners "rage-quitting" and selling all their coins.

I know sidehack can, i do think notto can by the way he has explained things to others . sidehack can't afford it he said  or he'd being doing it for home miners,and will if some one wants to foot the ticket with no limits,  he wants to design for home users, just no founds he told us, to make chips .

I thought they may have only worked with chips other people engineered and designed.  I didn't know they too can engineer and design chips themselves.  I'll give them a shout to ask some questions.

I'm assuming BitFury, Bitmain, Avalon, etc... own patents on the chips they use?  I ask this because a chip is made up of many layers.  Many times those layers have already been engineered and designed by intel, AMD, etc... and depending on how those designs of different layers are put together, one can accomplish different things.  It takes a hell of a lot of time and money to create a custom chip from scratch with many different layers.

ask sidehack or  NotFuzzyWarm  they both do design etc and can give some kind of ball park I think . yea we can't leave out the Home miner , i think even if i didn't mine my self at home, i would agree to.

I wish we could begin some type of "Crowd Fund" project for all of us other than the current makers of mining rigs.  

I'm not sure how much money is involved with engineering and designing a 16nm chip?

I'm not sure how long the process is for engineering and designing a 16nm chip for bitcoin mining?

I'm not sure how much a substantial size order of the wafers for the chips would cost?

I'm not sure how much the engineering and design would cost for the boards the chips would go on?

Bottom line, I'm not sure how much the cost would be [Ball park figure from start to finish] to engineer, design and manufacture a 16nm rig(s).  It may be that 2 or 3 different 16nm rigs could be designed and manufactured to meet the needs of all levels of home miners [no matter how small or large they are].  Maybe only one size should be made that would appeal to all levels...

Certainly, we as a community, can come together to figure out a way to do this.  No?

EDIT:  If we, as a community, are going to overcome the threat of 51% control by one company or 90% control by 3 or 4 companies, we have to work together to compete.  We have strength in numbers.  It doesn't matter how small or large an individual investment is.  There is strength in numbers.

There would have to be a minimum dollar amount on what an individual invests.  The issue is determining what that amount would be.

The minimum amount would basically be equivalent to the "cost" [from start to finish] for one rig.  The issue is determining the cost from start to finish for that one rig out of many.  The profits made from that rig by the initial investment would be left up to the investor by their operating costs when mining with that rig or number of rigs.

Once the community is able to determine the approximate amount of funds needed for a certain number of rigs, an escrow account of some type can be created for a crowd fund to receive the funding for that amount.  Those funds would not be touched unless the determined amount is reached for implementation.  If that amount is not reached by a certain time frame, everyone would simply get their funds returned back to them.

We would have to decide if the funds invested with bitcoin should remain in bitcoin or should the bitcoin be converted into USD to avoid volatility?  There are all kinds of things to consider in a type of venture like this.

There are for sure companies buying chips to make miners to sell them, good business certainly.

I certainly hope so.  If we (home miners) do see them, they will come from Bitmain and/or Avalon.  I would like to believe Bitmain has been working on a 20nm or 16nm design.  If they have been, I don't expect it to be available for purchase until September or October.  My two cents....

EDIT:  I doubt very seriously we (home miners) ever get our hands on a "new" 16nm rig made by BitFury.  Maybe a "used" rig several months later but not a new one.

I'm sure everyone noticed how Batches 8 and 9 BOTH came off the website as "sold out."  Then we have a batch 10 available for February 16 to 20.

Is it possible that Bitmain was not selling as many batch 8 and 9 rigs as they had hoped and ended up having to mine with them on their own?  Is it possible they took those batches off their website the beginning of their holiday and began mining with them over the holiday?  Is it possible Avalon has made the decision to do the same because their sales are not coming to fruition?  They had the rigs priced too high in my opinion.  They are still priced too high and they know it.  I can see Avalon and Bitmain combined easily adding that much hash power from rigs they intended to sell along with rigs they intended to keep for themselves.  It's also possible BitFury is testing quite a few rigs on their own or possibly beginning to roll out rigs ready for prime time while Bitmain and Avalon are mining with rigs they intended to sell.

I agree!

So back on topic, where are those 16nm miners, will we see them before next winter?

Yes, and this rocket increment in hashrate is a nightmare for us, homer miners... 

I would agree with you on that note.  However, they may not have built all of this and hooked it up in a month.  This may have been a "planned" event in the making for over the last 3 to 4 months in which they are now implementing.  This could be BitFury doing it themselves while mining from new "Unknown" pools they created.  Hell, it could be SPT being silent about the SP50.  I'm only speculating... sharing thoughts... more minds working together are better than one.

EDIT:  If we see a fairly decent drop after the Feb. 16 - 20, 2016.  It's possible Bitmain may have mined with the batch 8, 9 and 10 rigs over their holiday before selling them to consumers.