Lol stop reading too much into things.
Do I want to claim the bounty? yes
Am I glad makomk built a working one, and would I be happy for him if he claimed the bounty? yes
Do I want to help the bitcoin community by solving the problems on the enterpoint boards? definitely
I'm not trying to steal his ideas. I'm already going in a completely different direction. But if he made a couple tiny tweaks (as he said on irc "2 minor tweaks to icarus") and that solved most of the stability problems, those 2 tweaks could go a long way to helping everyone here. (by identifying the root cause of at least the worst of the stability issues). The engineer in me is curious as hell how he did that (when I struggled for so long to achieve it). ie: "where did I go wrong?"
As for how he got to 190Mhash, I'm not concerned about that. My 175Mhz bitstream should run just as well at 190Mhash if I had clocked it that high (if not better), but my 175Mhz bitstream is closed to "Xilinx specified timing". For now I'm focusing on trying to win stability, then I'd push as much performance as possible. Makomk managed to get stability early, so he released "overclocked" versions which are outside spec (and run fine). Because my bitstream never overcame the communications problems it made no sense to push it further (yet).
My suggestion was to open the bounty up for competition beyond the "first one to reach point X wins" approach, because I thought it would be an interesting race, which could drive up performance quickly. And yes to some degree, that leaves the door open for me to win the bounty. It also means if I achieve the bounty, (and release the source to it) that someone else will come along and beat my performance within a week, requiring me to "defend my title" and so on. And through all this back and forth, the bitcoin community wins by seeing fpga hash rates go up and up and up...
Makomk has released the source to his bitstream.
I've released the source to mine.
This isn't a war of secrets
Oh and a clarification:
First you ask about changing the bounty rules to have the ability to claim it as Makomk already reached it...
I don't believe makomk has claimed it YET, but I do think he's made an amazing breakthrough. Just because You believe that he has won it because you're having success, doesn't mean the majority is having stability with it yet (I see people posting it doesn't run at all on some boards, on others it's only 3 chips, and so on). But it's not my call. If the majority of the contributors agree, then great he wins!
and I'm happy for him. I wanted to clarify in that post since you were claiming all over the place that he has won now, that we should wait and see if it's actually stable, reliable, documented, and so on as the requirements state. AND I posted a suggestion which I thought would make things more interesting.