Topic: Community Miner Design Discussion - page 7. (Read 34221 times)

I don't doubt that sidehack can design a very efficient miner that "home/hobby miners" can use with their existing electrical and cooling infrastructure. I have one of his "green heatsink" Compac miners toiling away beside my computer adding insignificantly to the global hash rate.

My gut feeling with respect to the availability of chips of any generation is that the producers are relatively small and have excess demand from far larger existing customers for this current generation of chips, and so they have chosen to focus on the biggest bang for the BTC/USD/RMB/EUR/GBP or whatever currency you choose. It's a business decision. Additionally the mining machine producers can only get so many chips/wafers from the foundries that they use. Those foundries are making priority calls, too.

At the end of the day the home/hobby miner is pretty much the lowest priority for the mining ASIC companies. As long as there are huge commercial farms with hundreds of PH looking to upgrade, and/or investors with deep pockets looking to buy hundreds of PH in one go to build a new farm, the hobby miner will be relegated to the dust bin.

edit added: That said, if sidehack can get chips and produce an efficient home/hobby miner I'd definitely be interested in buying one or more.


Nice one. I typically use, "Opinions are like noses. Everyone has one and you can't pick mine."

Cheers,

- zed

IMHO:

To the extent that sidehack can, in the current fluid BTC mining environment, he has.

Waiting/pursuing a stable supply of "state-of-art" SHA256 hash chips.

3a: Financial:
Design, produce, and make available a reasonably priced 12nm-16nm SHA256 hash chip.
3b. technically:
create a driver module for that mythical chip that can be forked into the cgminer development effort.

Stated simply: if sidehack had a stable supply chain for a hash chips, 3 months out, the community would have a miner that would "BLOW THE DOORS OFF" anything offered by any other manufacturer. And I believe this is what frightens the current ilk of suppliers.

It's not a technical issue/problem, it's a power/control over the BTC mining environment issue/problem.

"Opinions are like butts, everybodies got one and they all stink."
The above is my stench.
 

God bless this topic, I enjoyed a lot. I am from and live in a Middle Eastern country. We have good electricity fees here for industrial sector. But industry is f*d up, business is f*d up , politics is corrupted, government is ruined totally, .... the worst corner of the hell, the Middle Hell.
I think btc is (or can be) a relief and mining is a door, the right one for us to begin entering to the btc world. We (millions of educated people here)  need bitcoin community's help and you need ours as well:
We can and must take part in the decentralization agenda of the bitcoin community, by our energy, by our money, by our knowledge and human resources.
We can beat Chinese or participate in beating them, they subsidize electricity? We own the source of their electricity.
We should start and for this we need help. We can't pay 2K$  to buy an already retired off-the-shelf Chinese miner hardware and wait for the halving , the difficulty to raise or some btc price drop to set us up. I can't convince people here to invest in the darkness, they won't. We need a certain minimum level of mastering and enough options and space to maneuver. We have to customize, to have the ability and the option to customize the technology.
For the moment I am deeply interested in this 'sidehack project'.  Unfortunately I couldn't be able to put together a good conclusive answer to my following questions (a lot of slang has been used, not a good practice for an international forum, though):
1- How can we define the ultimate, big picture target of the project today, after all discussions and improvements?
2- In what specific stage are we at the moment?
3- How can one contribute (financially, technically, ... )?

I am deeply familiar with Blockchain and bitcoin/altcoin technology and terminology but It would be highly appreciated if somebody please give me brief answers (from a technical/philosophical/social/economical/... perspective ) to the above questions using a formal plain language and literature. I need to know about this project's potentials to be hired as a platform for my plan to start a campaign for coordinating people's knowledge and financial resources here to take a role in the btc movement.

Less competition is why Scrypt designs like the Titan/A2/Alcheminer have had a long profitable run indeed.

 But in fairness, the S5/SP20 generation continued to be profitable even with the introduction and mass deployment of the S7/A6/B11 generation - as long as your electric wasn't sky-high.


 The other big difference is that Scrypt pricing and hashrate were VERY close to flat for almost a year after the Litecoin halfing - and what increase there was in diff was very small and gradual (and got mostly wiped out the last 2 weeks, WTF is happening there with the 20% drop on that last adjustment?).


 I believe Bitcoin is going to settle down into a similar period starting in the fall of this year, once all the big miner makers get their offerings on the market and the halfing has had time to settle in - with the potential of major price swings continuing to be driven by the ongoing issues in the Chinese economy that are looking like they might start impacting the WORLD economy before long.

isn't it  awesome even my Alchemist 256 i have 5 blades online is getting a killing  i want more power and am about to put two more blades online and donating one blade to a school so they can learn about  coins hands on . my eth rig right now is two cards but im about to make it 6 and yea i wish the S9 was a little cheaper id get one but may  get one or two s7 now they will drop even lower or one or two A6's . there is a reason i won't do much more for now , i won't get into here . even if the difficulty increase it won't be as bad as bitcoins because eth  runs off of gpu's, some place i read is paying wages in ETH now, so it's here to stay.

Yeah I agree...but if anyone makes a miner...scrypt seems a bit more nimble imho on the whole difficulty exploding thing.

Would sure help you ethereum miners (and turn me to one to) if the folk developing ethereum would say ..er never mind we decided to have it stay a pow coin and not go pos..
the problem with that happy dream is as soon as they were to really seem to be gonna do so..someone would make an asic chip for such.

But yeah 19 months and my Titans are still killing it is utterly confusing and probably 'wrong' if there are asic morals on so many levels...I'm utterly befuddled myself on wth is going on.

They will doorstop someday...but they have a whole 'knc we are evil vampire hard to kill' kinda thing going on at the moment

(probably should make an ethereum rig for a toy but alas I think that may soon pass due to difficulty increases on that network or am I mis-informed)

home mining ..the addiction..the movie.....the book ..the play....

That's only because NO ONE HAS MADE ANOTHER MINER to compete with yours,unlike in BTCland(where even the makers compete with customers) !!!! Be grateful !!!!

Personally I think Bitmain(& Avalon) is the last hoorah for home miners,Bitfury will succumb to the greed & keep the chips/miners to themselves as long as they can,if they even exist 

Too bad....because scrypt miners are just killing it on LTC right now.....(19 months with Titans and still making bucko bucks)

then again...all asic's will be 'doorstops's eventually don't ya know so maybe it don't matter hobby project wise.

Your pleas will fall on deaf ears, as this is primarily my project and I've never cared about scrypt ASICs. Maybe someone will extend it someday, but I'm really only interested in SHA256 miners.

What would be interesting to me would be a scrypt OR a SHA256 board with a current chip that was designed to bolt onto the HS/fan assembly from the old Gridseed "80 blade" design.

 Plenty of heat soak capasity, it was badly misused and UNDERutilised for that gridseed design, and a TON of them around cheaply available.


 (no, the horse isn't dead yet.)

!!!


all i want is a scrypt miner that's a moonlander with the hashspeed of a blade, or a U3 with the hashspeed of an S1.
is that so much to ask? ;(

NOW GO!      

or beat  here we go i hope it happens cat and mouse.!!!

I would think it will be about BitFury's chip.
Considering Bitmain now has (a limited supply) of their 16nm chips from TSMC it should be safe to assume that BitFury and through them their integrators are now getting their chips as well.

Since Bitmain has now set a benchmark with their s9 it will be interesting to see what BitFury's integrators come up with to match that 

Great news! Probably Bitmains new chip yeah?

While it's true it used a bunch of 1U server power supplies for mains conversion, that's not at all what was being discussed.

 They were using a bunch of 1U server power supplys to come up with ENOUGH power to fuel that monster - ballpark 15KW or some such it was specced at?

 Nothing to do with power supply optimisation, EVERYTHING to do with feeding it ENOUGH power.

Hoping to have some chip news soon - will keep everyone updated.

To me 3 chips wide could/should be more stable and forgiving of chip-to-chip Vdrop vs relying so much on the caps bypassing each node.

On the cooling fan(s) OT in the BitFury thread, it does of course factor into wall plug efficiency. Saving 30W or more is an appreciable part of the power budget. Good part is if the chips themselves consume less eg around 450w then less fan power is needed to remove it hopefully making for being able to use quieter fans. Win-win all around on that point.

Okay, looks like that is it. I know of some Bitfury designs that only had one chip per node (Nanofury NF6, OneString etc) but most have more than one ASIC at each voltage level, on a common plane. The Prisma was 3 chips wide, S5 two, S4+ and S7 both three wide. My BM1384 test pods are two wide, four high.

I don't know the details of BitmainTech's PCBs layout nor for the fact details of any other company. I can't really answer your question. All I've seen are some prototype designs with Bitfury chips, which were parallel connections of strictly serially connected chips. The more general layout is serial connections of groups of parallel connected chips. In the simplest case of four chips:
is parallel-serial a.k.a. "string"
is serial-parallel. The 2nd is more general and easier to control and stabilize.