Topic: is butterfly labs mining with those ASICs at the moment? - page 13. (Read 37544 times)

If BFL truly wants BTC to succeed, running 51%+ hashing power is no problem.  In fact, the only way to guarantee against a 51% attack is to know who controls more than half the network.  If that entity is you, and you are honest (follow the standard rules), no attack is possible.

If BFL just sees BTC as an means to an end, then we may have a problem.

+1

When the first FPGA I saw came out, it was 400MHs and around $600.  There was zero competition.  To a certain extent, making a chip is making a chip so the fact that these are $149 is amazing.  But with 2 more companies breathing down their necks with similar ASICs, tada, it's $149.  I'm just saying if those 2 competing companies weren't out there, charging $400 instead of $149 for something that runs at 3500MH/s would be perfectly acceptable to most people so they would.  In fact, they could probably get $800.

Many of us have sold bitcoin at 5-6$ to pre-order into the first batch, so yes there is something very wrong with them mining with our hardware.  They have specificaly stated they would not, I don't know why you are so happy with it and finding this "normal" business behavior.

They will most likely be selling ASICs at a huge profit once they've covered their fixed cost. There is nothing forcing them to accept trade-in or refund of past ASICs once they release much cheaper ASICs. They don't give any kind of price protection and I am very concerned by this.

What 400$ ?  Their 150$ jalapeno is a non-issue and their actual competitive SC miners start at 1200$ and 30k$

If there's nothing shadier than what's on the surface, I really don't have a problem with them mining with them.  It makes perfect sense.  If there's some sort of planned obsolescence going on, that I'd have a problem with but they're doing a trade in so it doesn't seem like their style.  If they're planning to outmine everyone after the orders are filled, that would be pretty bad lol.

Btw if there has indeed been no major shift between who solves which coins compared to each other, they could be multi-pooling to hide it or just not running as many as I think.  Who knows.  It's just too unbelievably stupid to not make a quick $100 off each card for a week before shipping them.

You know, the average laptop manufacturer gets $42 for preloading all the ebay links and norton demos and BS utilities and free trial crap.  Companies like Norton pay them big bucks to preload their software in hopes that full versions or demo extensions will be bought, and they are cuz people are lazy.  I think it's pretty shady but hey, $42 off a laptop lol.  So if the cards cost like $175 to manufacture and they mine with each for a week before shipping it and then sell for $149, that's fine with me Just lowered my price.  They do obviously have to stop mining when they turn off the card and ship it to you so they're not directly competing, except for X amount that they have mining at any given time.  Still, it's saving you money up front.

oh and to transisto, I mean the 6000 GH/s up from the end of July on that website.  And I based butterfly labs' timeline on gaming console release times since they're followed like hawks on Engadget and Slashdot.  When Microsoft makes a release date for the Xbox 360 for example, it means they're boxing for 4-5 weeks ahead of that date, shipping a few days before it, testing individual units for 2-3 weeks before both of those, testing initial demo units like 6 months even earlier, etc.  So with Butterfly labs' anticipated release date, they would have had quite a few assembled and in their hands in early to mid August.  The most money can be made while nobody but them as an ASIC obviously They do still have to beat their competition though, as someone pointed out.  The fact that other companies are making ASIC chips is awesome because without any competition, they'd be selling for $400 and be released 6 months from now

May I ask what increase you're talking about ? what graph you're looking at ? http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-2k.png ?

What is : "...the time that Butterfly Labs would be mass testing" ?

there are at least 2 other outfits racing BFL to bring ASIC to market, and BFL is still shipping FPGA hardware daily

the hash, it increases, we know not from where

its everywhere man

there could be a testing phase in a real world situation going on here.
if they do make the money back on the hardware that means they
can order more parts to make more mining equipment.

self replenishment.

I also think it's unethical for an employee of a hardware manufacturer to be mining on the same equipment.

Sorry folks, but in a market such as this, it would never be tolerated in other businesses. How do we know Josh doesn't have a competitive advantage ? Is he going to get a 1 TH unit first ?

I think the guy runs a great pool and has been a stand up guy, but once you go to work for a hardware manufacturer, it's kind of bullshit to be competing against your customers in something like mining where timing is everything.

Just my 2 cents. I am NOT saying Josh is doing this and as I understand he ordered his mini rigs before he worked for them.

I just continue to shake my head at how naive BFL seems to be in terms of building reputation. What are they going to sell once the network is saturated and there is no demand ? A more efficient ASIC isn't going to mean shit and if they make a 2 TH rig for the same price then they are screwing their preceding customers. This is really going to be an endless cycle I'm afraid.

On the other hand, building long term relationships built on trust and open information can go along way in a community full of people who are drawn toward decentralization.

^This. You won the prize!

I can name (just from people who I know have them) ~19 Minirigs, so that's 475Gh/s right there - I doubt BFL manufactured less than 100...

If this is BFL testing their ASICs, where are they mining?

http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/chart.php

If BFL was adding 6TH/s to the network testing ASICs, you would expect them to be solo mining. If they were running with a pool, EMC would be the natural choice. None of that is seen in the pool block stats; the ratios are pretty close to what they've been before. Slush is down, and 50BTC is 2TH/s up in the last 2 months, but nothing that would conclusively show BFL to be testing ASICs.

Probably a good way to offset the cost, if they're selling them at a loss...

It's also a good way to burn-in the units and see which ones suffer infant mortality.

I just said most of that although it reminds me of 1 more reason...maybe they're sick of everyone killing mother earth with millions of watts of GPU power so they they went all earth hippie on us and released something that uses like 100x less power to achieve the same results.  It's possible...are they from California?  

There's already a post on reddit with this same concern

The top comment by sgtspike brings up a very good point:

"Let's see... would you rather approach a venture capitalist (who knows nothing of Bitcoin), and say, "Hey, I need $2M, and I'll make $12M in sales in a year," or "Hey, I need $2M, and I'll make 1.2 million of this funny internet currency"?
Yeah...
Also, another factor you haven't taken in to account: If BFL was known to have more than half the hashing power of the Bitcoin network (which they undoubtedly would be able to achieve if they produced their own ASIC chips and mined on them before anyone else), all confidence in Bitcoin would immediately falter. And when confidence falters, the price drops, like a rock. And when the price drops like a rock, all those BTC that BFL is mining become worthless. Suddenly, they are out a $2M investment, and it was all for nothing.
They are helping to preserve the Bitcoin network by getting ASIC miners into as many people's hands as possible, increasing confidence, the price per BTC, and, logically, their sales (higher BTC price = more sales)."

They better!  They have $1 mil in pre-orders for them, lol.


:-O

I would not say that it doesn't make sense until an ASIC is proven to exist.
Moreover the price increase in the same period probably attracted to mining many with suitable VGAs (gamers) and possibly even investors looking for a quick shot and low risk (since VGA won't lose much value fast whatever happens to BTC), not speaking of motivating marginal miners like me to get back to work, until the going is good.

I do know Josh also mines for him self on a big scale with the current BFL hardware.
I don't think it's up to me saying how much he has now. I do know though.

That's what's so insane about that.  They're investing all this money to run a company and design chips and pay their programmers and test everything just to make a profit.  When they'd make $100/week running their wimpiest chip, they're running some of their wimpiest chips.  Just how many PCs and hubs and switches they wanted to throw at it is the limiting factor but I don't think they're running like 4 of them lol.

They just don't want anyone to know that they're competing with all their customers by mining alongside them for big big $$$.

That's what doesn't make sense.  Now is the worst time to pick up GPUs.  Everyone knows about FPGAs and everyone should know about the 50 -> 25 split coming up and should know that ASICs are coming out that will put their GPUs to shame.  So a big July-August rush to add to their rigs seems extremely unlikely.  It's really the worst time to expand a rig and yet there's the graph.

Now I guess more people hearing about BTC who already own a radeon card and simply start mining is very reasonable but still, that's an awfully big increase!

On the other side of things, the jump in August was about 6000GH/s.  That's 1714 Jalapenos, which would be hard to realistically run.  I'd say a company like that could easily come up with 25 testing PCs in 1 room that 1 person could operate alone for testing/mining with sufficient air conditioning, etc.  Prices get nuts with bigger hubs but you can pick up 8-port powered USB hubs and some power strips pretty cheap.  Most boards don't start having issues until you plug in more than 4 USB connections.  Usually cheaper boards have issues using all 14 (H77 chipset has that many I think).  So at 4 each, that'd be 800 units at once.  Keep in mind, they make A LOT bigger devices than the Jalapenos but if they're all Jalapenos, that's 2800 GH/s.  That'd explain half the increase.  Now if you were to take away 2800GH/s from that graph, you get a steady increase at a more similar rate to the many months before it.

Btw, random thing: BFL said they will not sell enough units to 1 individual customer if they suspect they're attempting to >50% attack them.  It's not a 51% attack, as 50.00000001% would do it btw so everyone stop saying that, lol.  Anyway, given the distributed 7000+ pre-orders, they'd need to make about 1.2x more and sell them all to 1 person lol.  That's over 10,000 of their smallest units.  So yeah, no worries there.  The only people that really >50% it is themselves.  But it's stupid for anyone to try that because as soon as you submit bad data to transfer a million BTC to yourself then verify the data yourself with your epic hashing cluster, thousands of people wonder where their BTC just went, everyone panics sells off theirs since the whole system is broken, and they're holding BTC worth $0.01 lol.  Good luck selling it, lol.  Oh, and without the ability to determine ownership, they probably would steal MTGox's BTC bank in the first place which would instantly shut them down.  So double good luck selling their stolen BTC then, lol.  An attack like that would be really, really pointless unless someone simply wanted to shut down the system, not actually make money from the attack.  I have a feeling BFL would be very unhappy if BTC failed so no, I don't think they'll try that