Topic: Dreaming about open sourcing an ASIC chip (Read 2220 times)

I only use electricity to heat my home, either directly or trough a heatpump.

If my hot-water tank could be heated by a miner to say 50C, I could have used an electric flash-heater to bring it up the last few degrees.

If you could mine with your water-heater, and the mining brought in 50% of the cost of heating it, it would be the same as having half-priced electricity.

If the sales of the Block Erupter mining device are brisk at known rip-off prices (and most of my fellow buyers on the group-buy I'm a participant in seem to agree with this assessment)  I'm very hopeful that sales at realistic prices will be through the roof.  I'm hopefull about the competition from the Avalon chips bringing prices of this class if mining rig down, and if Avalon really does dump half a million 280 MH/s chips on the market there should be plenty for this kind of duty.

I'd not seen ~friedcat's earlier message when he mentioned selling these a month or two ago, but he seems to also be of the opinion that it would be good for the distributed crypto-currency world to get hashing power well distributed.  It's really good to see someone who has the ability and gumption to make real things happen also have his general sense of the ecosystem seem to align with my own.  As opposed to, say, 'dreaming' about it.

And you didn't offend me at all.  Mostly you just confused me with the 'community' and 'my comments' line of exploration.

Yes, getting ripped off in BTC _because they can_.

Let's drop the "ask the community" thing, it's obviously not coming through. I didn't mean to offend you.

My point about the Block Erupter  is that group orders filling as they are and people paying as they are IS the community speaking for themselves.  Speaking with their Bitcoin wallets.

Even most of the people on this forum probably have no clue that these little things are (hopefully) just around the corner.  I would expect a lot more interest...and action...as awareness grows and they are demonstrably hashing away for people.

I honestly am a little baffled about what you mean with your "ask the community" thing.  I mean, is there someone who has some magical power to speak for everyone?  I've got my own opinions and I stated them.  I never tried to and never did indicate that I spoke for anyone else.

Good point about the BE, although in this high uncertainty period, I wouldn't be surprised if ppl paid ANY price to get a hold of ASIC chips before others.

But you are evading the "let's ask the community" bit.

What I take from your posts is that you have decided what the community needs and that's what they'll get, whether they like it or not.

If you're ASIC product is a FAIL (there are various levels, like very low acceptance), will the community have benefited from your generosity?

So who are you doing this for really. The community or yourself?

There seems to be pretty significant demand for horribly overpriced 'Block Erupter' USB stick miners.

That might tell people something...like...I dunno...perhaps a broad swath of the userbase would not mind the realistic ability to hash also?

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To be a little more fair, those who spotted and purchased BE devices are probably not typical, but I do believe that there is a lot of interest in mining which is quashed by the high barrier to entry.  Certainly more than is quashed by a more dense circuit on a chip.  Whether you like it or not, I do suggest that you be prepared for it.

You're not stating an opinion, you're saying you want to do something for someone.

I'm saying great, do you know what that someone really wants/needs (did you ask) or do you simply assume you know, or make a bet that what you think is right, is right?

I understand you want to give everyone enough hashrate to stay current and form a strong community. It the how and the what that you should be careful not to misjudge.

If you give sth that nobody wants, it's not much use.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying "make sure before jumping".

I see what you mean, but it seems to make little sense.  You seem to be saying that it is only valid to state an opinion and viewpoint which expected to be that of others.

I am a member of the community, have strong opinions about what would be in the interest of Bitcoin and distributed crypto-currencies generally, and have relatively good resources and interest to act on these opinions.  Generally I want what I think is in the best interest of the ecosystem, and I assume that many other participants are of a similar mindset.

You may if you like, for the purposes of this thread, consider my voice as an member of the community stating what _I_ want.

It would be a legitimate complaint that I am not a member of the mining community.  Until now I have felt that it was boring and made less sense from an investment perspective then to simply buy BTC and sit on them.  Mining is just starting to be becoming very interesting to me (which I had not expected to happen for another 18 months or so.)

Sorry to be the local troll, but you're just expressing your own bias, all energy sources discussions aside,

What about what the community wants? If you're doing sth FOR the community, you can either ask what THEY want or impose on them sth YOU think they want.

See what I mean?

Wood is not a factor.

Solar-electric is hardly uncommon though, nor is it a technology which is inaccessible to large swaths of the world's population on a geographical basis.  It is a bit uncommon to have a big enough installation to have it be practical to sell back to the grid leaving large numbers of people with the question mark about what to do with the excess electro-motive potential in times of excess.

Certain areas do have excess energy like Vietnam and small scale hydro.  Crypto-currency mining will never be profitable enough to justify installing generation potential I don't think, but it well could pay net profits over the cost of extra wear and tear on existing setups.

One thing I suspect is not high on the propriety lists of the world populations are for datacenter-sequestered mining operators to get rich mining with state-of-the-art hashing fabs.  Time will tell though.

BTW, it may or may not have occurred to some readers that a large organization could raise more money to be earmarked toward the design and fab low-nm chips by dropping one company picnic than a 'rich community benefactor' could likely achieve.  If/when they enter the game most of those who dream of being 'captains of industry' in the new economy will be swept away like a little bit of dandruff.

You're pointing out a lot of special use cases. Most ppl don't have a waterfall, or wood, or solar panel installation, or cheap electricity.

If I'd decide to give back to the community, I'd ask the community what it wants.

I live in the Western US.  Hydro-electric is common which brings prices down.  At the end of the day, a lot of people use electricty to heat a lot of things, at least where I live and that's not likely to change.

A neighbor of mine is lucky enough to have a waterfall and has set up a hydro system.  (Got it from Vietnam where they are in common use.)  It's just kind of a hobby system and he just has some baseboard heaters simply for the purpose of doing something with the electricity even though he, like most of us, primarily use firewood for space heat.  (I've got a home both in the country and in town.)

Any solar-electric systems are probably going to have periods of time when they are producing an excess of usable electricity.  I guess it can be sold back to the grid, but I'd personally just as soon mine Bitcoin...and ideally get some water heated up for later use at the same time if possible.

Many people feel that fossil fuels will become less and less desirable going forward.  For various reason.  Until there is a 'hydrogen grid', using electricity to transfer energy around is probably not going anywhere.  And again, if there are places to insert a hashing device into the system 'for free', devices which are designed for that will, hopefully, appear.

Epic. Wild west style

In everywhere other than the US electric is significantly more expensive. For example - in the UK I pay 15pence per kwh and that's quite cheap here! Electric heating is about 2-3x more expensive than gas or oil.

I'm not sure where you live, but in the US it is pretty common to use electricity to heat things.  In fact my house is well above outside air temp due to electric heaters as I sit here today.  And my coffee is warm for the same reason.

You are free to disagree of course.  I don't have a crystal ball, so we'll just have to wait and see on this one.

I will say that I just vastly overpaid for a Block Erupter and would do the same for any other devices which had the potential to distribute hashing power widely since I feel that the 'peer2peer' nature of distributed crypto-currency solutions is what gives them their strength.

Nail -> Head

Using electricity to warm up things (be it a house or swimming pool) isn't cost effective at all, and this is why it's not being used.
I don't think that we will see mining chips in something we use everyday and with other purposes, because it doesn't make economical sense to put them there.
I don't agree with your "we don't need low-nm chips because we will use the heat for other things" point of view.

Water boils at 100 centigrade at sea level pressures.  It's not commonly used to cool chips for fairly obvious reasons associated with how most chips are used, but it has one of the highest specific heats around and is super common for cooling many other things because it is really good in that capacity.  I doubt that it would be technically all that challenging to develop or produce a packaging form factor which employed water cooling if gathering the waste heat was an actual goal.

For something like a water pot one would need to be producing only as much thermal waste as is needed to account for insulation loss.  Most devices would be built with traditional heating elements to augment thermal production at higher demand times.

Something like a rice cooker would probably not be cost effective until truly commodity elements were around since one would be at idle to much.  But an American style tank hot water heater, or a swimming pool heater and so on would be really well geared for such a thing.

As for communications, that technology is already quite commodity and wifi systems are getting pretty ubiquius in homes these days.  At least in developed countries.

Actually... because sadly I hate to lose I went and looked this up, a quote from the raspberry pi blog:

"I’d like to draw attention to one cost in particular that really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things, and it’s an issue we’ve taken up with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

So we have had to make the pragmatic decision and look to Taiwan and China for our manufacturing, at least for this first batch. We are still working hard on investigating UK possibilities; at the moment, we’re investigating an option which would mean that all the Model As (whose demand we expect to be much lower than that of the Model Bs) will be built in the UK, and at the moment that’s looking quite do-able, although it’s not as efficient economically as doing it in Asia. I’ll fill you in on how that goes later on."

Link here if you want to claim foul http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/509

And before it, yes the reason I stated was slightly different to what it actually was but it was tax related any generally I was just making a point that the difficulty with ASCI chip production is making it efficient while competing with companies who can use proper factories and use investment money to make them in bulk.


Well, it could quite easily be a scam but if they want to give their design away for free then surely they'd do it already or at worse look for small investors for prototypes to then use for a kick starter scheme.

You forget that these hot water pots or rice cookers would have to be connected to the internet and contain silicone that is somehow temperature hardened to mitigate electromigration and breakdown of the chips.

Also, the wattage output from processor cores aint gonna have an useful output.

Datacentres maybe, but not on a commercial scale!