Topic: BlockBurner LLC - Crucible FPGA Scrypt Miner - Announcement Aug-19 - page 4. (Read 42395 times)

I have sent off our legal paperwork today to form us as a real, legal business in Montana state, the details of which will be posted publicly (barring personal details of the members) as soon as I get the confirmation letter back.

We have had somewhat of a hold lately with meat-world issues for all of us personally, as well as taking this step before we proceed much farther with the FPGA design itself. We have developed a clear concept for the overall product design and the features we want to include in this time however.

As usual I can't say too much more at the moment, but for an idea, Crucible is not just a single device  

Progress as of late has been a little slow with the Dev team being busy with real world stuff, like wives and jobs  But we have entered the most complex design element of the FPGA which will take a while to complete. I myself am just getting us legalized in the US to do business. With a few other things in the works I don't mind a bit of a lull for the moment to catch up a bit.

I feel like a broken record in saying "updates soon", unfortunately we're just not far along enough to be comfortable releasing too many details just yet, even from the legal standpoint as we are not incorporated as of today either so releasing any of our IP would be reckless until that is 100% locked in. Unlike other companies this one started with the first post of this thread instead of just dumping a website out there first with a vague promise and a buy button. We are displaying things in real time and not on hypotheticals or guesses.

I had read somewhere that KnC was inquiring about Scrypt miners, though as they have yet to deliver anything at all I'm not overly concerned. They don't seem very organized, plus PG has been all over them finding the cracks in their enterprise which are everywhere. It would stand to reason they should probably just focus on the ASIC they promised first before starting another product line in parallel, though FPGAs are easier to develop than ASIC hardware. We will see, in the end whoever manages to release a product does good for the network. Assuming cryptocurrency goes mainstream worldwide, there will be plenty of room in the market for the makers of these digital cannons 

We have something a little different in mind than current offerings however, I will say we are not working on just a single little board for sale, but a complete product line 

how is the status of the FPGA? KnC is also builing one and is set to have it ready in the summer

I don't have much in the way of a real update today, but I have done the most obviously important thing any startup can do:

I give you BlockBurner the T-Shirt Next time I'll probably not stare directly into the sun for these shots...

I am hoping to have an announcement on Tuesday 

Thanks for your support guys!



The main website is currently being migrated but should be up soon on its new home that is much faster and better protected.

watching & also interested

Following because I'm very interested in this project.  Gl with it.

+1

i'm quite interested - may drop a couple $k on this. Let me know how/if to invest in it

Operatr, how far are you with the proj? can we have an "alpha" estimate?

I think it is way early to worry about anyone trying a 51% attack, as that would entail a single person or entity controlling over half of all available hashpower. In addition to all of the GPU rigs currently out there, we would be adding a new wave of hardware on top of it to a diverse pool of people. I don't think it's worth worrying about at all. FPGAs will strengthen the network with something better and much more efficient, in a way we're just part of a natural upgrade to something beyond hobbyist hardware.

Unless someone makes a $10,000,000 order....I don't think we have to worry lol. Though that would be pretty cool 

Remember that these market caps are still microscopic in terms of the worlds GDP, assuming adoption starts to explode someday GPU rigs simply won't cut it as the backbone of a new "banking" industry because they just cannot scale after a point and remain viable. Difficulty will be extremely high the bigger the network gets. The only thing saving profitability are the coins themselves continuing to gain value in parallel to total network hashpower. Hashing is about to become some big, serious business, as will creating the devices we need to support this industry.

Jasinlee is correct, we will be going through several optimizations and a lot of testing ourselves. These are the first Scrypt specific devices, so it will take some fine tuning to get every last drop of performance out of them and ready them for production.

Market confidence? Thats not going to happen. (Too many things coming out that will bolster ltc price/confidence) As for the mining, I dont know why you think I said we were mining yet...we arent. Engineering samples does not mean running a full mining operation. Just because we have scrypt running on an fpga does not mean we are done with optimizations. Ask blockburner I am sure he is hitting the same thing on his end. We have probably 2 redesigns necessary before we order a mass production of our fpgas.

As for the mining early, yeah I will be, who wouldnt want to be able to pay their employees, further development, pay rent, eat, etc.

But all that will be accounted for along the way, we are just making sure we have a product to sell before we go taking peoples money is all.  But dont worry I dont take offense, there is just a misunderstanding somewhere along the lines.

My guess is we wont be up and mining until between Aug-Octo. based on the lead times we have been given for the devices we are going to build.

jasinlee

Is in fact a more honest version of BFL in that those guys developed the device and are mining with it , but in cost return ratio , they didn't make out like BFL , because of the inefficiency of the sCrypt algo

also they didn't take customers orders , but just like BFL , they will ship when the benefit equation rests on them shipping, perhaps when a lot of the alts are dead and/or LTC drops in price.

if BTC dropped to $15 and stabilized , every BFL order would be shipped next week.

don't take offence to that jasinlee - you are just doing what benefits you , and that's a good thing , that is the free market.

This all helps the evolution of the entity .

you misunderstand , i'm not actually talking about a 51% attack, i'm talking about the loss of market confidence.

something that seems to be hard for people to understand.. (which is fine if you don't understand it)

but market confidence is the only thing that keeps any value in any entity / currency .

if the market expects "decentralized" and gets " 20 guys that own ASICS" or even "100 guys that own FPGA"  that is a doomed market.

the result is that energy does not die it just changes form = evolution = market regains confidence, = FPGA obsolete (if it's provable)

51% attack is nothing , if that entity dies , that actually helps the evolution , and speeds up the demise of the centralization.

i am very interested in the project and if there is a working prototype i am ready to preorder

hopefully it will be here before BFL since i am not counting on making any profit of what i purchased from them by the time they deliver.

To help everyone put this in perspective, to achieve >50% of the network hash rate while solo mining Litecoin, it would currently be necessary to fire up a GPU farm of around 23,000 Radeon 7950's.  Assuming 6 GPU's per motherboard, that would be around 3830 mining rigs.  So, the current bar for attacking Litecoin with GPU's would be around $6,670,000 for the GPU's alone before adding in additional support components or a facility and support infrastructure to house the operation.

Disclaimer - Someone willing to invest that amount would probably just fund the development of PCIe breakout/bridge boards that drive significantly more than 6 GPU's per motherboard though, so the motherboard count above is only based on off-the-shelf components and PCIe riser cables.  We prototyped a PCIe x16 to 16 PCIe x16 slot breakout board (only 1 lane actually connected per x16 slot) using an off-the-shelf PCIe bridge IC on a 4 layer board, and it didn't cost much to achieve operation of 16 GPU's per motherboard.  It certainly cost less than the extra motherboards/CPU's/RAM that would otherwise have been needed.

Note - The cost to design, tape-out a prototype ASIC, get in with a wafer aggregation service (like MOSIS) to fabricate a few dozen of your prototype dies, and have them diced and packaged, is well under $1 million.  If someone has a better approach for calculating scrypt that isn't bottlenecked on external memory bandwidth and were aiming at a business that would otherwise possess enough FPGA-based boards to 51% Litecoin, they would actually be way way ahead financially to go the ASIC route right from the start.  FPGA's are very costly compared to raw die area per unit of logic area, especially at high quantities.  Almost all the cost in developing an ASIC is up-front, after that it's dirt cheap to scale the quantities up.

Time will tell, but as for the 51% that is also time will tell as we have to see what the network looks by the time we release them.

I've seen you mention this one before (recommending your FPGA design, if/when it happens, should not be used on pools), but I've had trouble following the logic.  If your hash rate per unit of up-front hardware cost is the same or worse than GPU's (and given my background on this topic, I have good reason to bet on worse), there's no particular 51% danger here.  Someone could equally well build a GPU farm for the same or lower cost if that was their goal.  Recovering ROI from lower power consumption over the long term for choosing an FPGA approach over a GPU approach would make no sense for someone attempting a 51% attack.

I think the only situation where there's a 51% concern from the general public's use of any hypothetical FPGA implementation (and not, say, a PayPal-funded 51% attack) is if you're claiming you have an FPGA approach that achieves a very high performance advantage over GPU's per unit of hardware cost.  I personally think you have an uphill battle even hitting the GPU performance/cost ratio.  Time will tell though.

I guarantee Sapphire, Gigabyte, EFX, etc.. will manufacture and stock larger quantities of boards containing Radeon GPU's than you'll likely have a market for in the Litecoin world!

As you may have read already, we do not plan on distributing massive amount of fpgas and we will in the end offer our design in open source. And per laseeks recommendation and our spitballing we decided it would be best to have a hard limit to how many we carry at any given time. I agree the danger of a 51% (even if we were only solo mining) is possible and should be avoided at all cost.

And as id like to say to both your self and jasinlee  I’m not against FPGA , not at all , its the potential to centralize that is the problem, if the multiple goes way out the window, the producers will mine with thier own device , this is a net monopoly effect also a centralization , then the market with have a concurrent effect , it will snap back at you , so i'm telling people to be careful, ASIC will be the downfall of Bitcoin , you , and they just haven't perhaps realized it yet , (i suspect some of the smarter guys have)

what the market will do is find a novel way that an FPGA can't be reconfigured in an easy manner to adjust to , i don't decide this the market does, as i said open source C++ will evolve much quicker than FPGA and ASIC, so be aware of the risks, although i notice Jasinlee mining with his already, but that’s not a net negative you guys just should be aware.

i will definitely order one based on the cost # power ratio - but just be aware that if and when the market feels that the equation needs a balance , kiss it goodbye. if they spread far and wide at a market price then that may delay this effect, but that whole profit motive tends to work against you there, irrational exuberance and the rest.