Well damn, I better just quit then A working proto and a solid business concept put into practice are two different things, it takes a lot to bring something new into the market. Anyone can have a design company produce something for a price. The infrastructure around it to actually ship them as a finished and refined product is the tough part. Many would be players will enter the fray only to realize this, only those who do it best will win in the end just like any other industry.
Do you think some type of modular system that scales would be desirable? As in some type of rack system that individual boards could be added to over time?
The only problem with using existing FPGA's that are meant for Bitcoin is that they will not perform all that great with Scrypt because of the intense memory usage factor, which most FPGA boards out there are not equipped for. I've been told there do exist types that would be optimal, though so far the expense seems drastic for these (like Merrick 4/5/6 boards that have stronger memory on board).
This is the key difference between what I am attempting to do, and what is already out there for Bitcoin mining. Litecoin is a very different animal with different requirements for best performance, so that is the direction I am going with this. A truly optimized Litecoin machine with a hardware spec in mind for it over using Bitcoin hardware, which can do it though not as efficiently as it could.
Yes.
>2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?
Would definitely buy some. Maybe $2k worth. And a reasonable price would be $1 per 1.0 - 1.5KH/s (If power use was low)
>3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
Probably not. One month wait at most. Just cause I've already waited once with BFL, and don't care to do it again. If you're going to hold my money, I'd rather use that money to build a GPU rig and run it for a few months. Then sell off the parts for the money to buy a working one that is ready to ship.
Which is the issue, the community has be so thoroughly burned you will end up having to fund it yourselves like we are doing. Or accept preorders and all the BS that will be thrown at you along with it. Its a double edged sword.
Indeed, though I think companies like BFL are looking bad simply because their core team is not cohesive on their answers to the community. Assuming there is enough interest to bootstrap the device, I would make everything public in the spirit of Bitcoin transparency as to the operating fund, what it is being spent on specifically, and hopefully realistic timeframes or at least updating on what is going on. BFL is certainly being sketchy and quickly earning themselves a bad rep for it. I don't want that.
ASIC is extremely expensive , and we're talking millions $USD to jumpstart something like that. FPGA is much easier to get into, and follows the natural progression that Bitcoin followed.
I also don't believe the other currencies are ready for ASIC power, as demonstrated by the Terracoin issue where a single ASIC device hosed the network and is still recovering. The power must scale linearly with the growth of the market cap and overall usage. It would be irresponsible to flood Litecoin with such devices at this time I think which would just drive up the difficulty, kill interest in Litecoin mining, and then kill the currency altogether. FPGA is the next logical step from GPU mining.
It is not enough for a business involved in cryptocurrency to simply make and ship product, we must be careful for the care of the network. Assuming it all goes to plan, I would certainly curtail a large amount of these things from hitting market at any one time, adhering to some kind of release schedule or batching as the new ASIC companies are doing.
Adam (Operatr)
BlockBurner.net