Next generation 14nm mining grid - page 4.

Anotheranonlol

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Quote from: EBM on December 05, 2013, 09:03:12 PM

Quote from: Anotheranonlol on December 05, 2013, 07:56:38 PM

what mobile sha256 chips are you referencing exactly? as far as i know, sure some modern smartphones have dedicated hw crypto engines, for example with iphone - aes & sha1 for key derivation, boot-chain verification and accelerated, transparent encrypt/decryption and data protection

but these are not 'asics' in the sense we are usually referring to and you cannot use them as such, you can't make any sort of app which would pass apples approval process & it's not like you could even jailbreak your phone and access the engine from userland, you'd need a low level exploit from kernel, iboot or bootrom to try and talk with it in any meaningful way,,really you'd be limited to using main ap, jus compiled arm

Apple's not in the picture, for the reasons you describe (and others). It's Android-only for now.

The mobile SHA-256 chips are not in production cellphones yet - but they will be by the end of 2014.

The article linked to in the OP is what first alerted us that mobile mining could become more than just a pointless afterthought, thanks to these new chips. We have since confirmed (as best we can) that they will indeed be accessible and usable for mining.

article does not really say much, do you mean like airmont, cherry trail etc?

crumbs

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Quote from: EBM on December 05, 2013, 08:56:57 PM

...
Our contact at Oxfam is quoted - and named - in one of that previous list of articles, by the way.

Would you mind giving me the name? I have already got a "Dear Supporter" form letter telling me to expect a personal reply within
2 working days Sad

Regarding your absurd mining cellphone idea:
1. What makes you think that SHA256 ASICs will be incorporated into cell phones by the end of 2014? Be specific.
2. What would these chips be doing in the cell phones?
3. If these chips are x10 more efficient than current gen chips, how long do you think a cell phone battery would last while hashing at a meaningful rate?
4. Perhaps offer a list of your current "ethical" clients. Being mentioned in blogs and human interest stories doesn't lend you much credibility -- all of them sound like filler copypasted from a PR release.

Your idea is inane. It is no more interesting than a kid mining dust with a botnet. Sure you can distribute an app to jailbroken old phones, but who cares? Your entire botnet won't mine a tenth of what a single current gen (at the time) miner would. Pointless waste of battery life.
Now go away. Angry

EBM

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Quote from: Anotheranonlol on December 05, 2013, 07:56:38 PM

what mobile sha256 chips are you referencing exactly? as far as i know, sure some modern smartphones have dedicated hw crypto engines, for example with iphone - aes & sha1 for key derivation, boot-chain verification and accelerated, transparent encrypt/decryption and data protection

but these are not 'asics' in the sense we are usually referring to and you cannot use them as such, you can't make any sort of app which would pass apples approval process & it's not like you could even jailbreak your phone and access the engine from userland, you'd need a low level exploit from kernel, iboot or bootrom to try and talk with it in any meaningful way,,really you'd be limited to using main ap, jus compiled arm

Apple's not in the picture, for the reasons you describe (and others). It's Android-only for now.

The mobile SHA-256 chips are not in production cellphones yet - but they will be by the end of 2014.

The article linked to in the OP is what first alerted us that mobile mining could become more than just a pointless afterthought, thanks to these new chips. We have since confirmed (as best we can) that they will indeed be accessible and usable for mining.

EBM

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Quote from: crumbs on December 05, 2013, 08:17:04 PM

I'll wait to see if my emails will be returned by tomorrow, and make some phone calls if they are not.
All the links you have given are over a year old, just like the cellphone article you've linked to, and none offer anything more than what a good PR girl couldn't accomplish in 3 days of cold calls & Press release spamming. Got anything more recent?

I'll check out your desktop app on a junk drive & see what it does when this gets tiring. What's it do Cheesy

P.S: Could you give me a hint about the right person to contact at OXFAM? I'm afraid that the emails i sent won't get a quick response, and we do want to clear this up, right?

I deliberately chose older coverage to prove we're not some recent invention. I don't know how you reconcile the 'PR girl with three days of spamming' being able to go back in time to do those stories, either.

More recent stuff: the Channel 4 News TV piece was 9th August of this year: http://www.channel4.com/news/facebook-fake-likes-online-business-charity-engine

Other stuff from 2013:

http://europe.nxtbook.com/emp/outsource/Outsource_31/index.php#/72
http://www.angelnews.co.uk/article.jsf?articleId=15050 (click the link in the article)
http://exhibit.hpcexperiment.com/resources/charity-engine/

We are members of the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF) (http://desktopgridfederation.org/members) and the Cloud Advisory Council (http://cloudadvisorycouncil.com/members.php).

We have EU science funding as part of the IDGF Support Project and we've been invited to several international conferences including TechCrunch Disrupt (NYC), NAFEMS (Boston), TNW Amsterdam, the International Supercomputing Conference (twice) and most recently the Dublin Web Summit.

All this is a matter of public record and easily found on Google.

Our contact at Oxfam is quoted - and named - in one of that previous list of articles, by the way.

PS. I appreciate the burden of proof is on us to show we are genuine. But equally, it is completely unfair for you to decide - and declare - otherwise without even waiting for the results of your own inquiries.

crumbs

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I'll wait to see if my emails will be returned by tomorrow, and make some phone calls if they are not.
All the links you have given are over a year old, just like the cellphone article you've linked to, and none offer anything more than what a good PR girl couldn't accomplish in 3 days of cold calls & Press release spamming. Got anything more recent?

I'll check out your desktop app on a junk drive & see what it does when this gets tiring. What's it do? Cheesy

P.S: Could you give me a hint about the right person to contact at OXFAM? I'm afraid that the emails i sent won't get a quick response, and we do want to clear this up, right?

P.P.S: Could you give me a list of your current "ethical" clients, or does your app add new zomblers to an aging botet, so u can mine some dust?
(but better still, just GTFO my bitcoin)

Anotheranonlol

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what mobile sha256 chips are you referencing exactly? as far as i know, sure some modern smartphones have dedicated hw crypto engines, for example with iphone - aes & sha1 for key derivation, boot-chain verification and accelerated, transparent encrypt/decryption and data protection

but these are not 'asics' in the sense we are usually referring to and you cannot use them as such, you can't make any sort of app which would pass apples approval process & it's not like you could even jailbreak your phone and access the engine from userland, you'd need a low level exploit from kernel, iboot or bootrom to try and talk with it in any meaningful way,,really you'd be limited to using main ap, jus compiled arm

EBM

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Quote from: crumbs on December 05, 2013, 07:21:08 PM

Quote from: EBM on December 05, 2013, 06:49:06 PM

Crumbs - we are not a charity. I did say that (twice, for emphasis) in the OP: we are a regular UK company. CE is our app.

The app already exists for PCs. It's based on BOINC.

CPU power draw isn't linear with usage. We run idle CPUs up to the 'sweet spot' of 60% max usage, which only uses about 8% more power over idling.

The extra energy draw for having the CE app as a background task is therefore typically less than 10W. But for those 10W, we effectively get half of a full-fat CPU.

That's why it's so efficient, and why we've had industry recognition like this:

http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-volunteer-grid-them-all
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft-green/archive/2012/09/28/this-week-in-sustainability-federal-agencies-use-information-technology-amp-charity-engine.aspx?Redirected=true

PS. Those nine charities are official partners, too. Oxfam's due diligence took over a year, for example: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get-involved/how-your-company-can-partner-with-us/Charity-Engine

Thanks for the links.
I'll contact Josh Henretig (the blogger on msdn) to find out the source for that article. I'll also contact OXFAM (this will be a bit more tedious, they're big, don't know how quickly they reply to emails) to find out what your connection is.
This is hilarious.
Thanks again Cheesy

You're welcome. Here's some more coverage of us:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17995888

http://www.careinternational.org.uk/how-you-can-help/change-how-you-live/charity-engine

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/ways-to-give (scroll down)

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679116/charity-engine-the-ethical-supercomputer-that-can-win-you-10000

http://www.talkincloud.com/charity-engine-the-even-cheaper-cloud-supercomputer/

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/23/spare-some-idle-cpu-cycles-for-charity-this-season/

http://boingboing.net/2012/04/18/grid-computing-turns-your-idle.html

...and although this was more about how Facebook's dodgy dealings nearly put us under, here's us on prime-time UK TV News: http://www.channel4.com/news/facebook-fake-likes-online-business-charity-engine

It's very real, Mr Crumbs. Has been for a while.

crumbs

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Quote from: EBM on December 05, 2013, 06:49:06 PM

Crumbs - we are not a charity. I did say that (twice, for emphasis) in the OP: we are a regular UK company. CE is our app.

The app already exists for PCs. It's based on BOINC.

CPU power draw isn't linear with usage. We run idle CPUs up to the 'sweet spot' of 60% max usage, which only uses about 8% more power over idling.

The extra energy draw for having the CE app as a background task is therefore typically less than 10W. But for those 10W, we effectively get half of a full-fat CPU.

That's why it's so efficient, and why we've had industry recognition like this:

http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-volunteer-grid-them-all
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft-green/archive/2012/09/28/this-week-in-sustainability-federal-agencies-use-information-technology-amp-charity-engine.aspx?Redirected=true

PS. Those nine charities are official partners, too. Oxfam's due diligence took over a year, for example: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get-involved/how-your-company-can-partner-with-us/Charity-Engine

Thanks for the links.
I'll contact Josh Henretig (the blogger on msdn) to find out the source for that article. I'll also contact OXFAM (this will be a bit more tedious, they're big, don't know how quickly they reply to emails) to find out what your connection is.
This is hilarious.
Thanks again Cheesy

EBM

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Quote from: ?? on ??

Oh, what you are talking about is generic mobile chips with some sort of SHA256 operation.
So basically you want people to invest in a MOBILE PHONE APPLICATION?

Yeah, this isn't going to work. They won't remotely compare to what ASICs do. Bitcoin ASICs do not simply SHA256(x), they do the whole "search for SHA256(SHA256(x+y)) with and gimme y when the result has zeroes". That simply won't compare.

This is coming to Intel processors too: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sha-extensions so the whole smartphone thing is ridiculous again - if it's efficient just write a desktop application, and you can be pretty sure that there will be an open source miner available.

You are mistaken. Please follow the links in the OP.

EBM

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Crumbs - we are not a charity. I did say that (twice, for emphasis) in the OP: we are a regular UK company. CE is our app.

The app already exists for PCs. It's based on BOINC.

CPU power draw isn't linear with usage. We run idle CPUs up to the 'sweet spot' of 60% max usage, which only uses about 8% more power over idling.

The extra energy draw for having the CE app as a background task is therefore typically less than 10W. But for those 10W, we effectively get half of a full-fat CPU.

That's why it's so efficient, and why we've had industry recognition like this:

http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-volunteer-grid-them-all
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft-green/archive/2012/09/28/this-week-in-sustainability-federal-agencies-use-information-technology-amp-charity-engine.aspx?Redirected=true

PS. Those nine charities are official partners, too. Oxfam's due diligence took over a year, for example: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get-involved/how-your-company-can-partner-with-us/Charity-Engine

PPS. There is actually an error on that page (profitshare is 33-33-33, not 50-50), so thank you for pointing it out. Fixed.

PPPS. The MIT article was linked to because it describes how custom hardware SHA-256 chips are coming to mobiles. I could have just said so, but figured a source would be useful.

crumbs

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Quote from: EBM on December 05, 2013, 06:09:30 PM

Quote from: crumbs on December 05, 2013, 06:00:14 PM

Quote from: EBM on December 05, 2013, 12:47:55 AM

...
We plan to harness what will soon be the largest and most efficient pool of hashing power in the world; hundreds of millions of cellphone SHA-256 chips, as described here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508061/custom-chips-could-be-the-shovels-in-a-bitcoin-gold-rush/
...

I'm not sure i understand. Why are you linking to a one-year-old article? Are there SHA256 asics in cell phones? What is it that they do for cellphones?

Not yet, but they are coming.

They will do hardware-accelerated encryption. It's become such a common requirement for smartphones that custom silicon is the logical next step.

What, exactly, will the SHA256 ASICs do in the cell phones? Hardware-accelerated encryption? RU serious? What does the linked one-year-old article have to do with this?
What is happening to my forum?

*looked at your "charity" site. LOOOOOoooOoooollllz!!

"How we raise money for great causes -- and the prize draw

Charity Engine takes enormous, expensive computing jobs and chops them into 1000s of small pieces, each simple enough for a home PC to work on as a background task. Once each PC has finished its part of the puzzle, it sends back the correct answer and earns some money for charity – and for the prize fund. (It also earns more chances to win.)

Where does the money come from? Science and industry. The grid is rented like a giant supercomputer, then all the profits shared 50-50 between the charities and the lucky prize winners.

Charity Engine typically adds less than 10 cents per day to a PC's energy costs and can generate $10-$20 for charity – and the prize draws – for each $1 of electricity consumed.

It is the most efficient way to donate to charity ever invented."

D00d, ramp up ur game! The people who would fall for your scam are too dumb to have any money Cheesy

EBM

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Quote from: ?? on ??

Quote from: EBM on December 05, 2013, 05:43:44 PM

The default setting is only activate when plugged in and only use wifi - if you don't mind it running on battery or using your mobile data allowance, then yes; you can run it 24/7 by all means.

However, most people do mind. The majority want an app like this to be totally invisible and unobtrusive.

Ugh. Mining really shouldn't be costing much on a data plan, and again, it's stupid to ever shut it off. (But also stupid to run it on battery.)
There is simply no reason to put that thing in a smartphone. Make it a USB miner.

You miss the point.

Custom SHA-256 encryption chips are coming to cellphones. Millions upon millions of them.

Yes, those chips will also make ideal USB miners, but that means buying chips and making (and selling) USB miners. We have absolutely no need to do this.

We will be harnessing the exact same chips with a free-to-download mobile app, in numbers we could not possibly achieve by selling USB sticks.

Plus, the grid is far more than just a mining pool. Please read the pitch deck, it explains.

EBM

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Quote from: crumbs on December 05, 2013, 06:00:14 PM

Quote from: EBM on December 05, 2013, 12:47:55 AM

...
We plan to harness what will soon be the largest and most efficient pool of hashing power in the world; hundreds of millions of cellphone SHA-256 chips, as described here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508061/custom-chips-could-be-the-shovels-in-a-bitcoin-gold-rush/
...

I'm not sure i understand. Why are you linking to a one-year-old article? Are there SHA256 asics in cell phones? What is it that they do for cellphones?

Not yet, but they are coming.

They will do hardware-accelerated encryption. It's become such a common requirement for smartphones that custom silicon is the logical next step.

crumbs

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Quote from: EBM on December 05, 2013, 12:47:55 AM

...
We plan to harness what will soon be the largest and most efficient pool of hashing power in the world; hundreds of millions of cellphone SHA-256 chips, as described here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508061/custom-chips-could-be-the-shovels-in-a-bitcoin-gold-rush/
...

I'm not sure i understand. Why are you linking to a one-year-old article? Are there SHA256 asics in cell phones? What is it that they do for cellphones?

EBM

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Quote from: ?? on ??

Quote from: EBM on December 05, 2013, 12:47:55 AM

Cellphones are also typically idle when charging overnight.

So you'd mine during that time? That is so stupid.
First of all, that would mean the chip wouldn't be used 24/7. What a waste!
Then, the additional electric consumption during charging would slow down the charging and harm the battery (very sensitive to heating!).

You are assuming what we have and haven't thought of - or, more accurately, what the BOINC team at Berkeley University have or haven't thought of. That's the software we use.

Only the mining app is waiting for the mobile SHA-256 chips, the Android version of BOINC is already live and working on many distributed computing projects.

The software waits until the battery has charged first and doesn't run 'full tilt'. It does not harm the battery at all - although it does warm it very slightly, that's true. However, the effect on battery longevity is negligible. You wouldn't notice its effect for many years, long after the phone will have been replaced.

The default setting is only activate when plugged in and only use wifi - if you don't mind it running on battery or using your mobile data allowance, then yes; you can run it 24/7 by all means.

However, most people do mind. The majority want an app like this to be totally invisible and unobtrusive.

MPOE-PR

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Damnsammit

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I definitely will be looking out for the IPO in the future.

The dude abides...

Cheesy

EBM

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Quote from: Damnsammit on December 05, 2013, 03:38:30 PM

Definitely seems interesting and I hope to read about your future success!

My pockets are nowhere close to being deep enough to invest though Cheesy

Thanks, much appreciated.

It is a shame we cannot accept smaller investments. Issue is simply logistics - we would have to do due diligence checks on everyone and, even if that was doable, hundreds of shareholders are a whole lot more work than half a dozen.

Plus, it would put institutional investors right off. It's not the done thing until a company goes public.

We do intend to IPO in 3-5 years though, so watch this space!

PS. Is that the Dude? Sweet...

Damnsammit

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Quote from: EBM on December 05, 2013, 03:34:38 PM

Some misunderstandings here - when the mobile SHA-256 chips arrive, a single phone will do well in excess of 1GH/s. They will be effectively little 14nm (or less) ASICs in their own right.

iOS cannot be used. (At least, not yet.) The mobile app is based on the Android version of BOINC - which is already coded and in use. With almost 2m Android devices being activated daily, the potential hashing power is way beyond terascale.

This is not "just a mobile mining app", far from it. It's an existing - and successful - global grid computing platform which is about to expand to mobile devices - and which will be harnessing mobile SHA-256 chips as soon as they arrive, creating a significant mining operation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17995888

Cheers,
Mark

Definitely seems interesting and I hope to read about your future success!

My pockets are nowhere close to being deep enough to invest though Cheesy

EBM

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Quote from: Damnsammit on December 05, 2013, 12:15:32 PM

Quote from: zimmah on December 05, 2013, 12:01:08 PM

Besides, just how many phones do you think are needed to even generate 1 GH/s?

I would say an iPhone 5 probably can do between 10-20MH/s, so if the got a million of those hooked up and mining, it would be about about 10-20 TH/s

That's a tall order though...

Some misunderstandings here - when the mobile SHA-256 chips arrive, a single phone will do well in excess of 1GH/s. They will be effectively little 14nm (or less) ASICs in their own right.

iOS cannot be used. (At least, not yet.) The mobile app is based on the Android version of BOINC - which is already coded and in use. With almost 2m Android devices being activated daily, the potential hashing power is way beyond terascale.

This is not "just a mobile mining app", far from it. It's an existing - and successful - global grid computing platform which is about to expand to mobile devices - and which will be harnessing mobile SHA-256 chips as soon as they arrive, creating a significant mining operation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17995888

Cheers,
Mark

Topic: Next generation 14nm mining grid - page 4. (Read 7675 times)