Topic: BlockBurner LLC - Crucible FPGA Scrypt Miner - Announcement Aug-19 - page 3. (Read 42381 times)

I highly doubt that, please don't spread unsubstantiated rumors unless you wish to present some kind of evidence of this claim.



We have "crowd sourced" nothing as far as our design goes, so this doesn't apply. In a sense I suppose I did "crowd source" a team, but I could have done that on Craigslist as a job post. You seem to be implying we are stealing an open source design and selling it as our own without giving back, which just isn't true. It is a unique design from the ground up and not based on open sources. We are just selling specialty FPGAs of our own design optimized for Scrypt hashing, and thats it. We're not using open sources to solve major problems in the world the way van Ess describes.

If the tech came from open source originally, then yes I agree it should (and must) be "returned to earth" so to speak back to the community, as is the entire idea behind open source. Had we taken an existing design from open sources, changed it, and didn't return it and then profited from it, that would be wrong.

In fact the software we're developing to drive the FPGA is based on CGminer, and has a Java UI. As it is based on an open source software it will be released as such to the community as our own version of GUIMiner essentially (dubbed Igniter UI). There will be a customized variant with the device drivers included that will ship with them, but the core of it will always be open.




 

It's possible your dev team is somewhat less secretive about the project than you might be imagining.



I find the concept of crowdsourcing a closed project for your own commercial gain to be offensive.  While there's a couple different definitions of crowdsourcing, this section of the Wikipedia article on the topic regarding Hank van Ess's definition is apt:

  Well, you are welcome to your opinions, which is all they are as you are no more informed than anyone else. I find most of what you posted out of context or just wrong and needlessly hostile, as such I will not entertain it further unless you want to speak on something specific that you feel we have done wrong. Everything you noted is already public record, so...

Or did I do something to offend you personally?



I had not heard of eMunie yet, I will check that out 

We don't have a confirmed price of any kind just yet, but definitely are shooting for devices that are no more spendy than their GPU counterparts for similar or superior performance. In terms of raw power usage they will be much better and much more friendly to scale up, so your ROI will be higher using FPGAs over GPUs either way

Looks like eMunie qualifies as the 3rd coin.

As for a FPGA for LTC I'm wondering how much one might cost?

If anyone wants an entertaining example of how *not* to scam people out of investments in an FPGA scrypt development effort, while also gaining some insight on why other groups are real tight-lipped about revealing any technical details, try this thread:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/a-custom-designed-fpga-miner-for-ltc-215487

I jumped in at the top of page 3 and was the first one to call BS on whether the OP was legit, and it just got more and more entertaining from there as the OP dug himself deeper and deeper into his hole.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you guys haven't actually developed any IP yet.  Just a hunch.  I think one of the reasons for (more than one claimed FPGA scrypt development teams) not releasing any technical details is to avoid getting ripped apart by anyone with a better understanding of scrypt if you reveal any errors that shows you don't have anything.

A couple weeks ago, someone posted a solicitation for investors on his FPGA scrypt development project, which at face value looked legitimate.  People were waving money like crazy trying to get in on the ground floor.  But then he made the mistake of revealing just a little too much, at which point we laid in and ripped apart his technical understanding of scrypt, ultimately resulting in him reluctantly admitting he actually had nothing but a vague idea that maybe FPGA's might work for scrypt, and didn't even have an understanding of how scrypt worked.  It headed downhill fast when he started posting code from mtrlt's Reaper OpenCL kernel while trying to debate mtrlt himself about what the code even did.  It was a most joyous and fun thread, but at least it probably saved a lot of people with little understanding from losing money on it.




LOL, 2 developers on a closed project isn't quite a crowd-sourced effort.  



I actually didn't care one way or the other, as it quickly became clear you weren't pursuing any sort of open development effort and were actually just trying to base a business on the creative output of others without really having the technical skillset to contribute directly to development yourself.  But just as a point of curiosity, how many of the 20 interested developers had (or claimed to have) existing working scrypt FPGA implementations?  Or had ever taped-out a custom ASIC design?

I PMed you early this morning BitcoinFX (Unless I forgot to hit send?...if you got nothing I apologize I did try earlier this morning  ) I spent a while today getting caught up with the many messages in my various inboxes.


It is really with no offense personally that I must tip-toe around these kinds of questions. I hope it is understood we have our own IP and as such I cannot divulge certain details. That is not to say however I consider it a closed book.

As much as I appreciate offers to help us develop this product, there is a fine line in terms of having too many cooks in the kitchen so to speak. I already encountered that issue sifting through the many developers that applied in the beginning, unfortunately many more got turned down than got "in". I had no idea around 20 of you would want to be a part of it, which totally blew me away. Decisions just had to be made.

What I gathered from this is there are many very talented and passionate engineers around the boards with great ideas. I absolutely encourage anyone with ideas and implementations that can't be a part of BlockBurner at the core (at least not right now anyway) to develop their own efforts. All of it helps create a stronger network which is the more important part. I am doing this personally because I want to see cryptocurrency succeed.

Who knows what comes next. SHA already moved to ASIC, Scrypt is now entering the FPGA phase with a wide market to tap, maybe a third coin with a different hashing algorithm will come about that needs a special device of its own. This is a wild west industry, it is anyone's game  

Hehe, in the early days he at least Emailed me a "not interested" response (and I *do* have working scrypt FPGA hardware, as evidenced by my scrypt+chacha implementation that mined huge amounts of YACoin while N=32, but have made no claims that they perform anywhere close to the price/performance ratio of GPU's for scrypt+salsa(1024,1,1)).

Guess things have evolved from there to no response at all!  

OK. So I sent Operatr a PM regarding some FPGA 'tinkering' that I've been doing on my 'lame' AVNET Spartan 6 FPGA LX9 Microboard for scrypt mining.

See this thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/mining-with-an-avnet-spartan-6-fpga-lx9-microboard-220621

Basically, scrypt mining is very RAM intensive and you can currently get the best performance in windows utilizing the available host system RAM as the FPGA equivalent of CPU / GPU 'Hyper-Threading' / 'Hyper-Memory'.

I'm trying to find a perfect balance between hardware and software with my 'home brew' project, so that I can perhaps look to scale it up on bigger and better FPGA boards.

Operatr's response thus far has been 'nothing'. A simple not interested would suffice. However, I'm sure he is busy and this might just be an oversight.

Although, I hope this isn't going to be another BFL type project i.e. 'style over substance' ?

I think I'll stick with my 'home brew' project / boards for now and might look to sell them via ebay if they are worthwhile, cost efficient and stable enough.

Good luck anyway. It's an interesting project and I might consider purchasing one in the future.

Cheers

Legal legitimacy, yes. BlockBurner will very soon be BlockBurner LLC in my home state of Montana.

 It took a while to get to this point, but as a bunch of strangers at first no one was too quick to want to jump into binding legal statues. The project itself has been going since day 1 however, a lot of design work has been completed up to this point.

It may not be seen as something I really needed to point out, but I said this would be a transparent enterprise, and I meant it. This all started from the OP, you are watching the formation of a company in real time



That aside, awesome feedback! These are all great ideas we would be pleased to deliver. We have a fine balance of enough features to be good but not so many that we get bogged down in creating the first unit, some of these may need to be saved for future revisions. I really do like the prospect of remote/mobile management, as it appeals to the IT guy in me 

He mentioned submitting some of the legal paperwork to operate above board as a "real" company, so I guess that is the reasoning. 

Why the "Going Legit" in the title.  Was it not legit before.  Are you moving toward legitimacy?

Exactly !!! Dream Device

it must be scalable dev, all the rest for the user

Since this is more a hobby for me than a major source of income, I like the idea of small-scale miner that can be used on a variety of cryptocoin, but will pay for itself in a month or two (or before the diff goes through the roof .  I'm thinking one or two units sticking out of the USB ports I already have 'laying' around. My long-term plan is to move more effort to 'forex' than mining, but using mining to prime the pump while it is still feasible without running a server farm in your basement.

Q: Since scrypt is harder than sha, is it feasible to have an sha capability in the device as well? (not necessarily running concurrently)

1. Manage things remotely (such as a web-interface, automatic reboots)
2. Ability to import/upload config files for easier deployment
3. Stand Alone - configuration is built into the device so no need to plug in via USB
4. Wi-Fi connection (after initial config) so I don't have 10000 cat6 cables running all over the place. Easier to just set up a bunch of WiFi networks + extenders in the area.
5. Ability to order from EXISTING stock and not pre-order with vague timeframes and delivery times ... I like ASICMINER's process (only sell what we have on stock).

Dream Device

I'm definitely interested and will certainly keep an eye on this.

I'd love to see a secure way to manage from mobile devices, such as iOS & 'Droid.

If it ran on a proprietary mining application, it'd be great to have a monitoring tool for Android/iOS and be able to control it from there in regards to the pool its mining on etc.

 



We have our own thoughts for what kinds of features and options to put into this, though I value community input, so-

What would your dream device include?

nice1 Operatr, looking forward for more details.