Topic: Bounty: development of efficient open-source FPGA/ASIC mining solution - page 2. (Read 10604 times)

Maybe this will get someone closer to a full implementation.

Either of the above devices must cost no more than $0.60 USD per megahash per second that they provide, and must consume no more than 0.3 watts per megahash.

IF they bought it to play games, yes they do.

Again, you need to ask for your econ education funds back.

This is a ridiculous statement.  The costs for a pro miner, per MH, is far lower than an individual miner, purely due to efficiencies of large-scale mining.  Everyone pays for the GPUs, everyone pays for power.

Just because someone bought the card for gaming doesn't mean they get to automatically ignore it as a cost for mining. 

Plus these are not people who will buy the ASICs anyways.

I can't see this happening.  At the time when inflation drops off to low levels, transactions processing fees will be more than adequate to make up the difference.

Anyone with enough capital to fabricate an ASIC will require maximum return on investment.  Maximum return will always be mining, and in later years fee processing.  It will never ever be eclipsed by selling chips as commodities.

I have been seeing a lot of times comments that make it sound as if a US$300,000 development cost for an ASIC is a crazy-high cost, far out of reach.

Yet I also recall having read this same day that the bounty for an open source GPU miner was BTC50,000.

How much is BTC50000 nowadays?

Isn't it actually *more* than US$300000 ?

So whoever picked up that previous BTC50000 bounty might single-handeldy be in a postion to be able to afford to have an ASIC developed?

How many others have BTC50000+ lying around, maybe from back when they picked it up for a penny a coin or so?

Surely a mere US$300000 to US$500000 or so is far from out of reach for the bitcoin community?

-MarkM-

First off, professional mining cannot compete over the long term with individual miners, who have near zero facilities costs.

Some don't even have capital costs, because they are presently using GPU's that they would have bought regardless.

  Eventually, Purpose made bitcoin mining cards will become available.  For no other reason than once all those heavily vested professional miners (such as ArtForz) reach a point that their profit margins are squeezed too much to continue to expand, they will monetize their hardware designs by selling the cards for individual users.

I would think that any mining "board" should be built with a FPGA. ASICs can't be changed at a later date, so if bitcoins ever switch from SHA-256 to a different crypto all the boards would be useless. With a FPGA, you have a better chance of being able to program the new implementation.

I would think that any mining "board" should be built with a FPGA. ASICs can't be changed at a later date, so if bitcoins ever switch from SHA-256 to a different crypto all the boards would be useless. With a FPGA, you have a better chance of being able to program the new implementation.

I hate to be the one to be the destroyer of hopes & dreams, but I need to explain the economics of this to you guys.

Nobody will ever sell you an ASIC miner. 

I hate to be the one to be the destroyer of hopes & dreams, but I need to explain the economics of this to you guys.

Nobody will ever sell you an ASIC miner.  The reason is simple: profits.  The amount of money to be made selling ASIC is so miniscule compared to the profits that will be made by using them for mining.  Using simple estimates, I would say it is 1000x more profitable to use ASICs for personal mining vs. selling them.  It makes no sense to sell them to other miners, which only increases the global difficulty anyways.  Furthermore, the number of savvy miners around who would buy ASICs is small (I'm guessing less than 100 at the time of this post), so the market is tiny.

The only point at which it would make any financial sense to sell them is after the block reward goes down to something really small.  At that point, mining would have very limited profitability, and money would be made from transaction fees.  Then it may make sense to sell them to other miners.

Just as a reminder to everyone, Artforz already has mining ASICs.  He is wisely keeping them to himself.  This milestone already has been reached, and the number of people who will join this club is very very limited.

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I will offer a 10 BTC bounty to the first person who either:

1) Makes publicly available the source code and complete setup instructions for an FPGA-based Bitcoin mining device that can be created with off-the-shelf hardware.

or

2) Offers an ASIC-based Bitcoin mining device for sale to the general Bitcoin community, and makes publicly available all schematics, source code, and other relevant information used to develop said device.

Either of the above devices must cost no more than $0.60 USD per megahash per second that they provide, and must consume no more than 0.3 watts per megahash.

Designs must not be encumbered by any sort of "intellectual property" restrictions, with the exception of GPL-style copyleft licenses.

- -Chris Acheson, 5/17/11
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I will gladly match Chris Acheson's bounty of 10BTC on his terms.

A basic FPGA miner isn't a lot of work and it would be a fun project
for someone who hasn't done this kind of work before.  A _fast_
fpga miner which will achieve competitive performance would be a decent
accomplishment.

I think it's important to the health, security, and public confidence
in bit coin that a few large private parties do not retain a substantial
long term advantage in their ability to control the hashchain.

Making sure that the public has the lowest cost access to the mining
state of the art should be helpful for this purpose.
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