Topic: DESIGNING the next generation FAST CRYPTO CURRENCY MINING MACHINE - page 2. (Read 22909 times)

any news and update?

Ignoring the suitability of that board for mining, it's about 3x the cost of the comparable DE0 board.

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=139&No=593&PartNo=1

If you just want to buy something to learn with, I would go with the DE0.

BTW: neither of those are good for running the existing open source bitcoin miner.

I'm seeking a handful of EE's to sit down in a google chat and talk about steps needed to draft an RTL for a scrypt mining FPGA -> ASIC?  Mathematicians, Coders, Designers, Inventors are all welcome... but this is SPECIFICALLY to talk about Developing an RTL; if you do not have that skill set you will not be helpful.

Who is qualified to design a full RTL and interested in this conversation, any readers here?  

Please post below or PM me if you can add meaningful dialog to such a conversation.

(1) space reserved for EE Doctoral Candidate.
(1) space reserved for chip designer with 0.18um specialty.

I believe the evidence of Viceroy hypothesis is being manifested ig the rise of new crypto currencies. Those are a result of the people leaving bitcoins and thinning of the base of miners that were in bitcoins. Now if you want to argue that the base has not left and its a natural expansion of the idea of a decentralized currency it still shows that miners are choosing other currencies other than bitcoin.

Still not a good trend imho

the marijuana industry is brand new in Colorado, it's only 4 years old and new laws are being written right now.  you might never imagine that the large stores are putting pressure on the state to craft a law that favors the big player.... these are tree hugging hippies!  it's amazing how quickly peoples interests turn into a legitimate lobbying force.  but I digress.  I'm trying to understand what comes next and how best to hedge the bet.

At this point I predict people will migrate en masse to a scrypt (or other) based solution as soon as they can no longer generate any meaningful income against the ASIC army.  The estimates (see my sig) have been daunting with difficulty tripling in the next three months and difficulty quickly raising to 1 billion.  The only reason your (brother,father,mother,son) knows about bitcoin is because of YOU.  And you probably do or did mine bitcoin at some point, or perhaps a miner turned you onto it.  And that doesn't even touch on the philosophical question of who controls the mining process and the danger of centralization.

Mining is the core of bitcoin.  What is the future of mining?  Or does ASIC spell the end?

If YOU evangelize for some-other-coin, IT will become the 'next best thing'.  I see no alternative.  Educated people are NOT going to purchase a BFL if Inaba remains the voice of it.  Avalon has no idea how to manage media and cannot possibly win the hearts and minds of the average joe miner.  There is an opportunity in this chaos.  What is it?  Is it making a scrypt ASIC miner before Inaba?  Is it making a sexy case for a bunch of Avalon chips?  Is it making a supercomputer?  Can you even make money mining bitcoin at all and if you can how long will it be until you cannot?

so many questions 

I think you bring up some good points Viceroy, but to assume that ASIC mining will consolidate itself to the hands of a few is flawed logic IMO. This might happen if the market were not free (ie governments/corporations passing laws monopolizing the mining process) but the market is free for the forseeable future. Even if huge ASIC farms spring up, average Joe will still compete for his share of the pie as newer, smaller, and more efficient consumer ASIC solutions are marketed. Miniature ASIC mining devices and pools are going to be everywhere.

You also assume no new technology will ever trump ASIC, which is also flawed. Next year, ASIC will be the new GPU, and there will probably be faster tech on the horizon. Yes, difficulty will rise to meet ASIC hashing power, but it will not skyrocket beyond our collective reach until the next new tech emerges.

Your scenario might play out if the big players started lobbying to have laws passed on their behalf in order to monopolize the mining market. Don't give them any ideas

Interesting.

And if you want people to read what you wrote you should learn better use of the "quote" function.


Well, sir, feel free to contribute useful walls of text.  The OP is the first major revision which was made after the realization that the ASIC war appears to have ended.  Prior to that revision this was a post about potentially creating the chip that butterfly may never deliver.  Now that Avalon appears to be shipping and has sold more than a half million chips the question changes and so I removed ALL sub-posts and started over.  Which I intend to do again shortly though I've been busy with more pressing matters.  So don't be surprised when I pm you again to tell you I've removed all the posts.

I'm assuming you mean /19 network as in PRIVATE. It has everything to do with NAT if that is the case. because when you send data outside your broadcast domain NAT happens via default gateway

Indeed, your original post is in great need of revision. It's hard to read the wall of text, and you should instead format the sections differently. I think instead of using rhetoric you should focus more on separating into different sections, especially the beginning.

what do you mean? what I said has nothing to do with nat.

because people can't digest 20 pages of nonsense.  I'll take what I need from the posts and then modify the OP.  Then I'll erase all the posts and see what people think of my edits.  I think I can manage this thread, fwiw.  ;-)

Apparently there's a lot of other "useful" information that you did not delete. Looks like you need to learn better use of your thread moderation powers.

Also, if you don't mind me asking, why delete useful information? That would greatly benefit people's learning and background of your project.

Well, it would seem as though were posts were quite informative, yet he still deleted it. Meanwhile, he did not delete your previous reply. What does that say about that?

I already know he is being ignorant towards others.

As the ABOVE posts, Viceroy deleted EVERYONE's post to clean up the thread. NOT to Silence you

Once again, since you keep deleting my posts, let me make this clear.

Your ambitions on building a "next-generation" crypto currency mining machine will simply not work out. How many people would you actually expect to help out on this project? It takes millions of dollars just for the R&D phase, let alone assembly and whatever else.

Who will provide those millions of dollars in capital? How can people trust you with what minuscule credibility you have? People want to see someone that has real experience in logic design and that they know what they are talking about. You have shown nothing.

In face, you have shown yourself to be unable to be respectful to others in this thread, instead you even continually insult and delete my posts as well as other posts that are perfectly fine, which you should have no reason to.

Why not accept well-rounded criticism to your project?

inb4youdeleteitagain.

That IMO is a impossible idea to achieve as the vast majority of the world does not own a PC with a GPU let alone an entire rig to "compete" with what most miners pump out now. Mining will always be specialized when taking the "bigger picture" look at things.  Bitcoin mining has always been the more power a user can produce the more they can mine.  It's just operated under the assumption that enough people will be mining so that one person can't take over the network, which so far will continue to be the case due to the vast number of ASIC orders from just the initial batches alone.

The network will still be decentralized, it will just be on ASICs instead of GPUs so the pool will shrink at the start.  As you can tell as someone who's bought a ASIC, it will not just be centralized groups, it will still be individual miners such as yourself.  That pool could easily increase however, if the price of bitcoin increases as the difficulty goes up making ASIC mining still profitable for those who get in "late".  All of the charts currently projecting ASIC ROI vs difficulty all assume a stable price(which has already increased to 139 as I type).  If enough venders, buyers and speculators continue to adopt and use bitcoin we could even see GPU mining continue some profitability regardless of the drastic difficulty increase.

Of course the reverse could happen, and BTC could crash and become worthless thereby making ASIC purchasers SoL.  It's a risk that's debatable whether it's still worth taking, but sometimes with big risk comes big rewards.  I just feel the position held by the OP that the ASICs signal the death of bitcion is far fetched, and you've done little to sway my opinion.  Bitcoin has always been something that will either turn out to be huge, or end up worth nothing.

nope. bitcoin was developed from the idea that most users or shall i say all users mine.

just like with bittorent all users serve files. again strenght is in decentralization. your notion of professional miners runs against the idea of decentralized - distributed transaction confirming network. it is against the original bitcoin idea. but hey nothing here is set in stone right?

i can afford an asic. in fact i bought one. so from my point of view i still can make some money. but still i don't think asic is a good idea for bitcoin.

Surprised at my own ignorance and the apparent lack of reaction of knowledgeable readers of this thread, I found out about PPCoin (PPC). Apparently PPC tries to solve the mining HW race problem, by not only minting by proof-of-work (which is HW minable), but also by proof-of-stake (which allows for long-term average-Joe profit). They have their own forum HERE.

I strongly recommend everyone to have a look at the following 2 papers:

1. "Synthetic Commodity Money" [George Selgin, 2013]
2. "PPCoin: Peer-to-Peer Crypto-Currency with Proof-of-Stake" [S.King and S.Nadal, 2012]

After having briefly read the above articles, I am more convinced of the decline of Bitcoin as described in the OP. Although, Bitcoin may very well be a great currency for the next couple of years, the number of miners will steadily go down until we are eventually left with commercial mining operators (like already mentioned) and a small hard-core group of amateurs, mining mostly out of academic interest and not-for-profit. Therefore, it seem fair to say that a crypto-currency based on a more evenly distributed minting process (e.g. as proposed by PPC) will eventually take over.

For a complete list of other crypto-currencies look HERE.

This is the way forums are. Let them bicker until they realize they're getting angry over practically nothing, or at least until you give them beer ^_^

The way I see it mining BTC isn't dead to the average user, or the GPU miner, or anyone. Just the ability to make a large amount of cash based off our our current understanding of the trends in the market. Our GPU rigs may be powerful, but they suck up massive amounts of energy and produce a lot of heat. Those with FPGA's will just see the declining profit margin and may never be able to achieve ROI.

However mining won't die unless everyone gives up.

Remember - cryptocurrencies were created for lack of government regulation, and in this case our profits and the market is being regulated by the creation of these companies like Avalon or BFL. Any currency is dominated by the people who want the most out of it.