Topic: High Efficiency FPGA & ASIC Bitcoin Mining Devices https://BTCFPGA.com - page 42. (Read 218473 times)

I am port forwarded, yes I hand built a list of nodes. I use it to jump start a fast connection. It was a pain in the ass but it will work for anyone anywhere to give them roughly 100 connections.

All you have to do is put in your details in the file

Download the block chain on a new client very fast


If people want it I will be happy to post it.  Simple, but a pain to put together

You have to port forward through your router to get more. I am more curious how to jumpstart the connections. Does this mean you are connecting to specific nodes?

how'd you get so many?  i'm stuck at 8.

tI don't want less

put this line in your bitcoin.conf file :
maxconnections=16

And you'll get less connections.

I have a technical question.

How many connections to the network are people getting on a node?

I am running about 170 average, but it varies greatly. 2 ip addresses

I am running a .conf file i put together to jumpstart the connections, but it is capping at about 85 per ip

any thoughts?  what are people getting as a high connection count?

Crazy to think that people will be mining with ASICS by the end of the year.

Good post and discussion.

Although I currently have BFL FPGAs and have yet to pre-order a bASIC, I have deep respect for Tom and others (ngzhang with 'Avalon', for example. And BFL with their 'SC' lineup) who have taken this bold step into the ASIC world.

Interesting times ahead, indeed.

Hello

Business trip lasted a little longer than expected. I am back in town now and working regular hours, going to start working on the backlog of emails and returning phone calls.

If you call me today and I don't answer it's likely I am too busy with something else or on the phone with someone else but please leave a message and I will call you back. I don't return calls for people who don't leave messages. PM's are last priority so if you need something right away its always better to call or email.

thanks
Tom

New meme!

People buy horse power and drive torque...

People buy GH/$ and mine GH/w...

Now we just need a picture to go along with it.

Valid points. I think however ASICs are end of the line and improvements will no longer come in leaps and bounds.

Under this assumption, I share your forecast on the fact that the next version of ASICs will bring improvements in Gh/$ ratios as more chips are crammed into boards and R&D costs for chips are already recouped. No (major) changes in Gh/W ratios. Perhaps ASICs v.3 will bring less nm designs and changes in chip design that will bring Gh/W changes but that won't happen too soon.

So, although you will be able to buy more Gh for the $, if you have an "old" ASIC device that still has a good Gh/W ratio, you should be good. Because again, Gh/$ is what will get people to buy more ASICs. Gh/W is what will keep people running them.

I understand your argument that the increase in difficulty brought by the "new" ASIC devices with their super Gh/$ ratios will make your "old" devices produce pennies a day. But like Inaba said, a Jalapeno is a noiseless, low maintenance coffee warmer that you can stack up a few under your desk and let them mine. ... with one condition!! Electricity costs < Pennies produced (aka Gh/W efficient).

+1

Good point, keep us updated on this!

Yes, I cannot imagine a technology beyond ASIC. The constant necessity of upgrading in order to remain profitable is not an appealing situation for miners. And this 'staying power' is one aspect of ASICs that I am cautiously optimistic about. I would love being able to mine with the same ASIC for a year or two, but I'm too conservative to consider that a likely reality. And I could be wrong.

For the future of ASICs, I was thinking more along the lines of price. After 1/2 year or so of selling product, an ASIC vendor may very well have paid off their initial investment in process/equipment setup and one-time non-recoverable engineering costs.

Manufacturing the silicon wafers, in terms of per-ASIC cost, is relatively inexpensive. A few dollars per chip. After that, it *should* (I admit I'm just guessing here) be possible for vendors to offer the same product at a greatly reduced cost. So instead of a bASIC or SC Single selling for $1000, it might eventually be offered for $500 or $200 and still be profitable for the vendors.

Those future ASICs wouldn't necessarily be more 'efficient' in terms of GH/W, but they *would* be more efficient in terms of GH/$ compared to the products being offered now. One would need to stay on top of the ROI game. As ASICs become more dominant and drive difficulty up,  marginalizing mining profit, I would certainly agree that having a more power-efficient device would be more desirable. The question is how quickly will this point be reached?

28nm ASICs are a huge step forward from 130nm ASICs and there are a lot of steps in between

How much of an increase will ASICs get in the future? Will ASICs one year from now be 10% faster? 50%

The problem is that there is no disruptive technology on the horizon.  CPU's had GPUs on the horizon - a huge leap forward.  GPU's had FPGAs, another huge leap forward.  FPGAs had ASIC, another huge leap forward.  There's no huge leap forward for ASIC.  Yes, there's a process shrink, but it's not going to see a 10x bump in hashing power or effeciency like we've seen up until now, so history can't really play as a guide in this instance, which is why the power issue is more important now than it ever has been. 

Everything you said is true as far as the past goes - but ASICs are the end of the line for the foreseeable future.  So I expect even first gen ASIC devices to be in service for a much longer period of time than any of the other technologies, and again, this is why power is important and not a "Oh that's nice factor."  The ASIC devices (no matter who manufactures them) are likely to be quiet and not require much maintenance.  You should be able to leave the min a cupboard and let them mine happily away for an extended period of time... and that means something that uses 2x or 3x the power is going to be far less profitable than one that's more power efficient over the lifetime of the unit.

In a nutshell, with ASIC you can just keep adding to your farm, unlike previous technologies, where you had to replace to keep up.  That is, unless the power consumption exceeds it's profitability.  I'd rather have that happen later rather than sooner.

In the context of bitcoin, terms such as 'short-term' and 'long-term' do not have the same meanings as we might normally attribute to them. For bitcoin, just a few weeks or months can have significant shakeups: BTC exchange rates, new products or services being introduced, major exchanges or businesses being hacked or exposed as scams, new government regulations being introduced.

Planning anything in the bitcoin realm beyond half a dozen months, let alone a year, is rolling the dice.

How long did CPU mining last once it became mainstream, before it was obsoleted by GPU mining? How long did GPU mining last before it was obsoleted by FPGAs? And by 'obsoleted' I don't mean 'unprofitable'. After all, GPU mining is still profitable (but CPU mining is not). I simply mean that a device has been introduced that is significantly more efficient in terms of GH/W and in terms of GH/$. And how long did FPGA mining last now that ASICs are around the corner?

All of these technologies (CPU, GPU, FPGA) lasted roughly a year. I was a small-time GPU miner back in July of 2011. I ordered BFL FPGAs as soon as they were announced. My first pair of Singles was mining in March, merely 7 months ago. I don't expect them to be mining come January, however.

Not that they will no longer be profitable ... they will ... but consider this: with a difficulty of 3 million, an FPGA Single makes $3/day while using $0.15 in electricity. This is quite efficient. Let's say that by the end of January enough ASICs will have been installed to drive the difficulty up 5x, to 15 million. In that environment, my FPGA Single will only be making $0.30 per day (1/5th due to difficulty increase, another 1/2 due to block reward dropping to 25BTC/block), but still requiring $0.15 in electricity.

So my FPGA profit will drop from about $2.85/day down to $0.15/day. Still a profit, but it would be silly to continue mining with such a device. Would I want to live with the heat and noise and wasting of space for a mere $0.15/day? Nope. I'd rather sell it. Or, if I couldn't sell it, I'd throw it away ... even though it was technically 'profitable'. Profitability is not the only criterion for determining whether to continue mining or not; there are many other variables to consider.

Same with GPU mining. GPU mining today is still technically 'profitable'. But to earn more than a few dollars a day after paying for electricity would require a large amount of GPUs. If they were quiet, and cool, and reliable, and didn't take up space, I would be happy to run them in a cupboard somewhere earning spare change. But they are nothing of the sort. I would not tolerate putting up with a bunch of GPUs unless they were generating significant profit. In today's environment, unless electricity is free, mining with GPUs is something I have no interest in.

Come January, FPGAs will be in the same boat as GPUs are today. As to my previous example of a BFL Single earning $0.15/day after the block reward cut and a 5x increase in difficulty: the ROI at $0.15/day would be ridiculous.

And back to OT, I would not personally be too concerned if the bASIC consumed 1.5x, or 2x, or 3x the power of BFL's offering; I think the 'short-term' profitability of all 1st-gen ASIC devices will be high enough that electricity costs (whether $0.10/day or $0.50/day) will be insignificant relative to gross profit. If you are looking for an ROI of 6-9 months, you will very likely achieve it regardless of power consumption. Higher power consumption would have mostly a logistical effect: how many I can run off a single wall outlet.

Only when the 'next generation' of hardware comes out, again with significant GH/$ advantage over these 1st-gen ASICs, will power consumption play anything more than a minor role. And is history is any indication, that could happen in the latter half of next year.

I just pre-ordered a 27GH/s ASIC unit from you, looking forward to getting it! I remember seeing a contest to win a quadminer from you, but can't seem to find the thread anymore. Is this still on going?

You are right but you must count, that the hw becomes obsolete due to the increasing difficulty. So I think the best is to count max. with 2 years hw so count the price of purchase + the consumption during expected life.

More than that, it's who continues to develop subsequent generations of the technology.

If these guys are smart, they're already working on designs for the next generation, using a smaller process size, as well as any other improvements they can manage.

Not that energy efficiency isn't nice to have.