Topic: BlockBurner LLC - Crucible FPGA Scrypt Miner - Announcement Aug-19 - page 14. (Read 42381 times)

Main advantage of FPGA is scalability. It will be interesting to get their tech. spec. of alpha samples.

A serious question would be- are FPGA's really necessary? What problems do they solve that GPU's don't already solve? FPGA's had an advantage in bitcoin only where cost per m/h was concerned, in total hashes- GPU cards still had more. I think there are probably few Litecoin farms (although this could change) and most LTC miners probably don't consider their power cost in the cost of mining.

So, is it really worth it?

I would certainly be interested in pre-ordering. Here's a bit of math (very simple) for people to chew on:

A GPU rig can be built, if you know what you are doing, and have it in a out-of-box setup with cheap CPU, mobo, etc, for around $1 per kH/s. For example, a 1.5-1.6kH/s system could be easily built for $1550 or so. The major advantage that FPGA units have over GPUs is not outright price ($1 per MH/s in Bitcoin mining for GPUs, BFL's 800MH/s unit cost around $700 if I remember correctly) but power consumption, often by close to an order of magnitude. As well, they are generally quieter, and their modular design allows for you to run many of them in a small area from one host computer. Some of the usual worries about GPUs such as heat dissipation are not as big of an issue with FPGAs.

After I got off on a tangent, I feel a fair price would be somewhere around $1/kH (per second, of course), as it would be competitive price-wise against GPUs while showing some major advantages, especially for people with expensive electricity, or without a room where they can put very noisy machines.

Cheers, best of luck with this project!

Awesome guys 

I am still researching into it and sourcing out an appropriate FPGA board that is more optimized for Scrypt than previous FPGA Bitcoin offerings.

I am very much interesting in persuing this further.

On the pre-order end, it would be the only way I could feasibly do it (banks wouldn't touch me with a 10 ft cattleprod...). I am working to get some pricing for a viable prototype to know where the cost to get started would stand, and following production. I assume as others they can be built on site easy enough.

Some of you have expressed deep knowledge of FPGA, I may be contacting you to build a dev team. Let me know if you might be interested in helping.

I am hoping by approaching a new company like this right here with all of you before just building some shady looking website populated with products for pre-order that in no way exist will alleviate scam concerns as we keep moving. We can all see this from the ground up. Nothing will be done at all without some realistic figures on the cost from prototype to production. Only in that case would I open it up, with you knowing 100% what your money is being used for with total transparency. Still that is a lot of trust in some random avatar on a forum, I agree. In roping in established and trusted community members and building my own credibility as well we can quench the scam alert and build a by-community for-community device.

A little more about me personally:

I am a long time computer and networking tech, primarily operating small-medium size IT infrastructures of all kinds. Over the last few years I have also added web development and graphic design work to my portfolio, as well as business tech consulting (aligning businesses with streamlined presence online and in house). My position in this would be mostly business logistics and organizing, though providing my technical expertise where needed as well to build the business support infrastructure.

My new company known as BlockBurner is just as new as any other, currently building my own Bitcoin/Litecoin mining farm as a 100% bootstrap effort on it's own that is in its infancy. Unlike most however, I have no pricing or products or services listed because I am realistic, and don't believe in what other mining operations are doing in this regard. If a product or service appears on my page, it will be because it actually exists and is ready to ship to the public at large as soon as you click "buy". I have no unrealistic expectations when it comes to trust, especially when there are so many scammers out there trying to cash in on enthusiast mania. (Im helping track these fly-by-night scam sites in fact because these people hurt the community and discourage adoption, which sucks) https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1835276

More to come soon

Operatr

being more interested in fpga mining than gpu mining myself, which currently puts me off litecoin atm
If this could be done, and hash rate / price etc were reasonable, yes

yes, will buy one if price and hash rate are resonable

1. It is ready. We' ve been talking and waiting for this a long time ago.
2. I would definately buy one if it's really worth it. It should be cheaper than GPUs, quickier and you should consider the difficulty rise.
3. I would, but only if you guarantee me about the hashes that it would produce.

TIA

The problem is that the on-device block RAM is insanely slow compared to GPU ram (about 10 times slower for most FPGAs).  The per slice block RAM for most FPGAs is also less than 128 KB (more like 8 KB in typical cases).

The tradeoff described above works (reducing the memory size a lot and just recreating the entire lookup table more often), but the performance decrease is usually so great that it's problematic.  If you can make the algorithm run in parallel better I think it may be possible to get into the high double digit KH/s or perhaps hundreds with an FPGA.  We'll have to see what LaSeek and friends come up with.

it would have to be $0.6 or less per kh since you could achieve around that with simple gpu mining. I MIGHT buy one (no preorder plz) but i would rather buy the plans for building it myself.

1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?
Yes
2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?
Yep, I would definitely buy one due to the electricity rates where I live. I'll be willing to pay $0.8-$1 per kh/s or so.
3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
If the price falls into what I find reasonable, and I find the seller trustworthy.

Just speaking on purchasing part, only and only if it is cheaper than a gpu or equal pricing. End of the day someone could care less about the $50 extra per month in electricity compared to the cost of the FPGA. The break even point would be years depending on the price of it.

For example I can get a 7950 hashing for numbers sake at 600mh/sec at $300
The quad miner which does about 800mh/sec is sold for $1,069

In this example if you could offer 600mh/sec at say $400 is the only time I and probably many other people would consider it, other than that electricity costs don't justify spending over 200% for the device.

I'm very interested. I am on the fence about pre-ordering though.

I think a simplistic port of the existing scrypt.c from the litecoin source code would just use 128KB of block RAM, which is readily available on most of the FPGA's already in circulation.   I can see how it might increase the area/cost of an ASIC, but for an FPGA  it's a non-issue.

It's not clear why people are even discussing external memory requirements for this algorithm and getting ready to write-off their purchased bitcoin boards.

Overall, it sounds like we should expect an FPGA implementation of litecoin to perform at (1/1024) the rate of equivalent bitcoin hash.  And this is due to the sequential loops, and not the "memory-hard" aspect of the algorithm.

I started open development of FPGA mining designs in May 2011; BTC was about $5USD at the time.  The first commercial FPGA mining products first appeared on August 18th, 2011, and BTC was about $10USD then.

Food for thought: scrypt as it is used in litecoin is not a memory-hard algorithm.  Rather, it's an algorithm with a space-time trade-off skewed towards using more space, given the current relative costs of memory fetches versus computations.  You can implement litecoin's scrypt with only a little over 2 kilobits of memory, but it runs ~512 times slower.

It's likely that a performant implementation will use a sparse LUT to cut down on fetches.  For example, with a 512 element LUT (instead of 1024), the algorithm performs 50% less fetches, and requires only one extra salsa round 50% of the time.

Well first step would be comb through the old open fpga bitcoin project, that will give you most of the stepping stones. But you will need to read through the code yourself. It is a mess and extremely undocumented so if you cant find something let me know I might be able to point you to the resources we found along the way. Maybe you will be able to put the pieces in less than 5 months like it took us.

Awesome jasinlee I will do that. I agree, I just see Litecoin going where Bitcoin is now right along side it as a silver to Bitcoin gold. As BTC is blazing a trail through the old world financial system, LTC will start getting more attention and grow larger as a secondary economy as well probably. BTC has hit Stage 4 into ASIC, LTC should follow the same path, it seems FPGA stage is imminent.

Anyone remember the value of BTC when FPGA's first appeared off hand?



FPGA is already proven to offer similar or better performance as GPUs without the heat and substantial power requirement once you get to a certain point adding ever more GPUs to the mix. In price it works more like a "more now but less later" long term mentality. However since the only FPGAs out there are more geared for Bitcoin SHA256 than Scrypt, I am uncertain what kind of performance an optimized board would offer. I will need to prototype to see.

Yes. I'd want to preorder at least one sample by bitcoins (or litecoins) but only after people will write good reviews. Don't get me wrong, but here too much of scammers.
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Unfortunately these would be similar in price to Bitcoin FPGAs, simply because hardware cost is hardware cost, it doesn't care what you are doing with it per se.

Yes there are a lot of scammers out there to be wary of, I wouldn't expect a startup like mine to have any credibility until something is actually visible, and delivered as promised. Though this is why I am asking the community before anything else to build validity and everyone can see this start from the very beginning in detail. These sites like gxminer.com spring up out of nowhere (blatant BLF copy scam) without a shred of proof about their products or production even exist, or even who they really are, and are there just to snare a few suckers buying into Bitcoin hype. Even still legitimate manufacturers are so new to this emerging industry it is hard to tell sometimes.

I have no intention of scamming anyone, those people only hurt Bitcoin at large. My vision is a long term one, where many seem to be fairly short sighted when it comes to cryptocurrency. I believe its the future, and I want to help. Money is nice but only as a byproduct of the real reason Im getting into this, which is simply I believe we need it now in a world so utterly broken. BlockBurner exists for the betterment of mankind and nothing more. It feels like the right thing to do, and given my economic status personally, the only thing I can do that will make a difference in the world and in my own life. My faith is derived from being one of the many shut out of the banks system for good, which means also like many Im pretty much stuck exactly where I am, even my last IT position's salary was a sick joke, and I'm tired of it. With all my energy and resources, I will assist in taking that system out of power forever. Bitcoin is how we do that.  I am down to build machines with the direct purpose to siphon power back to the people, as they did to us.

Hardware is only one of the elements of Bitcoin business I intend to tap going down the road, which will give alternative sustainability to the hardware side.

I have an ASIC on order with BFL, though Im feeling a little iffy like the rest given inconsistent updates from the BFL crew. Unlike them Im not out to dick anyone around here. Just to keep building this dream with the rest of you.

There are other issues involved beyond memory.....we went down that road already a few months back.

Operatr: If you need help I am happy to give any assistance. The point of the fpga is to build value into LTC, we are not out to squash any potential competition. PM me if you would like any help I can offer.

Defnetly interesting. maybe you come up with a concept to reuse old FPGAs as well. Like all those spartan boards out there (without memory) could be used in a chain to work with scrypt?! (Just guessing here, i don't know much about this)

Yes. Why not? Don't see any reasons agaist that.
 
Yes but only if they will cheaper at 20-25% than similar bitcoin FPGAs, because they less perspective.

3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
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Yes. I'd want to preorder at least one sample by bitcoins (or litecoins) but only after people will write good reviews. Don't get me wrong, but here too much of scammers.

I'd be down for a significant investment if you could prove that they offer a serious advantage over GPUs.