Topic: Cost efficient mining hardware project (Read 17523 times)

cypherf0x: I'm certainly interested, although not sure how much use I would be. For what it's worth, I'm currently studying for a master's in physics, focusing on computational simulation of real systems, so I've got a decent mathematics/software background, just not much on the hardware. I'm actually quite tempted to grab one of the dev boards mentioned here, not that I expect doing so to be profitable (nor entirely relevant to this project), since it seems like as good a way as any to pick up some general knowledge in an area that looks as though it could suit me well.

bulanula: Pretty much everything you say about bitcoin could equally be said of gold, surely? The fact that it can be mined and can't be traded directly for most goods and services doesn't preclude its value or usefulness.

I'd like to contribute somehow as well, although probably with the later stages such after the initial prototypes have been built, as I don't have as much FPGA experience as others here.

You said you might need people for "general support" roles, I'd be willing to help however I can.

I spent a few school semesters doing VHDL on a Xilinx board, so I have general working knowledge of how everything operates, I'm decent with C/C++, networking, etc - so just let me know if and how I can help out.  Maybe after you have a prototype designed and plans put out onto the internet I can download them and attempt assembling one and give you detailed feedback.

I hope this project gets going quickly and actually succeeds at making working prototypes, sounds very fun!

Quit trolling you fuck.  Go sell your 5870s, but do so quietly.

We all know that once companies get hold of BTC they will make it go like a rotten apple. Companies do this all the time ! The end is near.

Better pull out faster than when doing it unprotected to avoid pregnancy LOL. My 5870s are on eBay already. Once they become worthless and everybody starts selling them they will become harder and harder to sell. What gamer buys old 24/7 used GPUs ? NONE.

Maybe there is future for BTC but gpu mining is all dead right now ! Don't say I did not warn you etc. !

LOLWUT they getting 200 MHs for some Spartan fpga !

Just thinking out loud here.  You say 500Kh/sec (maybe you made up this number?).  The low end "good" GPUs today are about 300Mh/sec.  So you would need 600 of these chips to equal one GPU.  Is that really going to be feasible in terms of h/$ and/or h/W.

Let's not hijack this thread with philosophical or emotional BS and keep it topical, shall we?

Count me in for hardware/software design, testing, and general input on scalability.  My background is IT/datacenter management; have already implemented designs with Microchop and Digi microcontrollers.  As an aside, you think crypto chips will yield superior results to the $16 Spartan 6's with 45k LEs?

FPGA clusters work, but... they're so expensive that you'll likely never recoup your investment.

The FPGA approach is the high tech way, but what if there was a way to do it simply?  The double SHA-256 is what needs to be accelerated.

There are cryptographic accelerator/security chips that will do SHA-256.  They may not be as fast as a FPGA or graphic card chip but they have a huge advantage over both in two areas

• They're cheap
• They're very low power

So what if you can only get 500KH/s out of it? It's worthless right?

Wrong, considering some of these chips cost less than a dollar and they're tiny so you can fit a whole lot of them on a board.  Yes there's IO considerations and other design requirements but those can be handled.

If you factor in the cost of power and hardware for current mining setups it's plausible to be able to create a stackable board at near the same cost point though using a fraction of the power.

And yes, this is going to be open source/open hardware.  The difficulty is going to keep going up making the power hungry GPUs less cost effective for mining.  Which means if you have the desire you can download a design and build it yourself if you so desire.

Anyone with hardware skills is welcome to join.

On fundraising, the current bitcoin stock system is crap.  On that the project will sell shares of the future project mining operations.  The shares will be PGP signed by the master project key and will later be transferable to a stock platform should a user friendly/accessible one be produced.

If you want to be part of the hardware or software team degrees are a plus but completed well documented projects are worth as much or more.

We need general support roles too.

If there is enough funding the standard development platform with be Altium as it will cover the whole process including FPGAs should one be included on board for management.  If it's on a shoestring then it'll be a hardware team vote (or whatever the majority of us already have)

There will be a lot of IC sampling and prototyping involved (Aka, the fun part) with the focus on relatively inexpensive chips already in mass production.  This is a research project meaning iterations of smaller less expensive prototypes before taking those lessons learned into making a larger board with more resource investment to loose.  I'm choosing to do it this way because of lots of experience with projects.  The big ones tend to fail, but the ones that encourage quicker iterations of working prototypes tend to survive based on the psychology of having successful attempts.

A tiger may be able to eat something big, but a colony of ants can do the same job more efficiently.

Let's not hijack this thread with philosophical or emotional BS and keep it topical, shall we?

Man, I'm glad you're taking your FPGA idea in this direction. I was worried you might go rogue and screw us all over or something.