Topic: BlockBurner LLC - Crucible FPGA Scrypt Miner - Announcement Aug-19 - page 15. (Read 42381 times)

Thanks for the great feedback so far guys. Keep it comin!


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.


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

+1
Go for it ! I'd make em in three flavors ... economy, makes sense, big $$$ ... all modular obviously. But there again lies the cost of development ... cheaper to just develop one and scale ... the gamble factor gets a bit better as these fpga can mine a broader variety of dustcoins
I'd preorder with an ETA of 30 to 45 days with a 33% deposit...

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.

>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?
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.

I would suggest looking over the open fpga project for bitcoin first. See if it will work for what your considering. If it does not look like something you would be able to easily implement (it took us many months to use it as a guide) then I would not bother. That would be a good starting point since you do not even want to touch scrypt until you know you can handle sha256 since you will most likely need to write your own module from scratch. And there is basically 0 documentation for fpga implementation of the salsa stream cipher. And the sha256 fpga documentation is incomplete and undocumented from what we found, it looks like the open fpga project was created just to get the bounty and was left almost completely undocumented except for the bits where it would effect the bounty.

Jasinlee and LaSeek apparently already have working prototypes, so you're a little late to the game.  But yes, the community interest is huge.

Yes i would be intrested in a nice FPGA+High speed Memory board, but  rather for use as a FPGA  than for litecoin mining. The problem is that a FPGA solution  will be hardly  less expensive compared to GPUs. Besides this, a Litecoin mining ASIC isn't that far away, there are some numbers from bitfury about  that. Besides the mining ASIC+external memory solution i would check if  a ASIC with embedded DRAM wouldnt more profitable, as it would save a lot of I/O pins, driver logic, expensive  PCBs, maybe it could even produced  in the style of topless memory Modules saving most of the chip packaging cost.

I'd buy one, and I'd pre-order if the time frame was reasonable.  But the the biggest risk here I think is will the price/performance ratio be worth it?

There do exist FPGA's suitable for the job. Scrypt's main issue that it is incredibly memory intensive, where SHA256 is highly processor based and uses little memory. FPGA rigs would vastly outperform GPUs and cost much less to operate long term. GPUs work because they are designed for the memory intensity of graphics processing and delivery, which a regular processors fast cache memory is also applicable, FPGAs can follow the same path but just be much faster to hash and power efficient. Up front cost for these benefits however, is higher.

Can it be done? Sure.  Will it be faster than GPU/CPU?  Probably.

The only problem I see here is that Scrypt is designed to be slow, because of the different conversion and hashes needed to prove the work.  This means, to get the most performance out of your FPGAs/ASICs, you would need multiple chips per card.

I'm just now looking into scrypt, and so I can't get very specific on what you would need on a card to make it substantially better than GPUs, but from a cursory glance, FPGAs stand to have a wider gap from GPUs in LTC than they do in BTC.

Hello, my developing crypto-currency business, BlockBurner (mostly a blog atm, but more to come), is researching feasibility in the generation of a real FPGA Scrypt Litecoin mining appliance, specialized for the task much like the SHA256 FPGA's and ASIC's Bitcoin is about to begin running on.

To do this, there are a few things I need to know from the crypto-currency community, please answer each question if you respond to this post-

1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?

2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?

3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production? (I'm no one but a lowly computer specialist and budding entrepreneur burned by Big Banking already, so this would have to be crowd funded to get started without a loan shark involved. You would be relying on me to deliver the goods and not squander the investment with idiotic decisions, even still you would stand to lose your pre-order through economic issues and unseen factors, so there is a risk to early adopters as with all things, though Im thinking of other incentives for early participants once it gets off the ground, what kind of incentives come to mind to make the investment more attractive to you?)

I am quite serious here and have had correspondence with a few FPGA/ASIC specialists to case exactly how much funding would be required for prototyping and limited production run. Though it would be reckless to proceed with it without getting community input, and I want to build a device that is based on your feedback so we get exactly what you want at the price you want.

What do you think? Time to elevate Litecoin to the next level as we did with Bitcoin? Would you help BlockBurner achieve this goal though community support? Should I jump off a cliff covered in green jello?


Updated 4/25

FAQ

BlockBurner news:

BlockBurner Forums

BlockBurner subReddit


The Team (still developing):

Operatr - Administration/Operatations
Cheshyr - FPGA/Project Management
Zalfrin - FPGA Development


Project Overview

Design Goals:

Modular Scrypt FPGA system
USB Connectivity
Stand alone/Rack convertible casing for scalability
Associated open source software package


I have had a few PMs and have seen questions regarding pre-orders for this project:


On Pre-Orders

Any pre-order campaign will be associated with the current stage of development. Unlike other producers there will be no pre-orders until a certain capital requirement is met meeting the estimated costs associated with that stage. At this stage it would be in generating a working prototype device. I am taking a community approach for complete transparency, every transaction would be made public knowledge as I think if you are willing to take a chance on us, you should know exactly what your money is funding and see it develop before your eyes.

This approach minimizes risk and gives a linear progression of development that is seen by the whole community.

I don't believe it is fair to hold pre-orders in a way that in a way fakes it as if it is a real product sold online, knowing full well it does not exist. I think this practice itself is fraudulent in nature itself.

Prototype Stage

Proto-adopters would be taking the bulk of the risk, as such we would work out some other kind of benefit to funding assistance at this stage. I am open to ideas on what you would like to see if you opted to be a proto-adopter.

A known price point will be known before any pre-order campaing begins with a known cap to hit, all pre-order capital going into third-party escrow until the needed amount is reached. Otherwise it would be returned to you. This could be receiving a prototype device to help with testing or some kind of future revenue sharing.

Production Stage Once a working prototype is created, we will then move on to casing actual production costs, and much like the Proto stage, will have a certain goal needed before any capital is invested.

To do this will require a crowd-sourced effort, which would be conducted through various forums as well as things like Kickstarter campaigns and the like.


Thank you in advance for your time and support,

Operatr
BlockBurner.net