Kudos to hashking for getting the ball rolling on this, although I would have expected the hardware development/marketing team to at the very least, match his (hashking's) share of the bounty.
I'd have to say, this definitely sends me some mixed signals in regards to confidence in this FPGA project...... and who feels more of it.
fizzisist, don't take this the wrong way, but, you are being given the opportunity to open up usage of your product to larger farm miners who use CGMiner exclusively, due to it's network/monitoring functionality....not to mention, have a good chunk of the bounty paid by other people....not to mention, future maintenance allowing you to dump your software all together if desired.
While the 20 BTC offer you made is 'nice'....What is stopping YOU from offering a direct-from-manufacturer severely discounted unit for development purposes ?
Am I really off-base on this one ?
Yes, you are.
First of all, MPBM is
not a product of FPGA Mining LLC, but of me personally. And it does support all kinds of monitoring as well. The X6500 being supported by cgminer would surely not be the end of MPBM development, and MPBM development is not paid by FPGA Mining LLC.
The only real advantage of cgminer is GPU mining support, and possibly also a bit lower CPU usage than MPBM. On the other hand, MPBM has
lots of features that cgminer can't offer (yet). It also doesn't support the X6500 exclusively, but it does support all FPGA boards that are currently available on the market (except for the newest ztex firmware, which broke compatibility basically overnight without any prior notice, but this will be fixed soon).
Secondly, it isn't as if we had to place any marketing offers at this point. The contrary is true: We're struggling to keep up with demand.
FPGA Mining LLC is pledging approx. $100 to support cgminer development, while other board manufacturers (ztex and BFL, to my knowledge) don't offer anything at all.
While we basically offer a board below our own production cost, we did intentionally
not tie this offer to buying a board for development, to also allow people who have already bought one to take up on this offer. I really can't see what's wrong with that.
Yeah, as a I said before, I don't see what anyone is missing with MPBM, except maybe more documentation to explain the depth of well thought out and useful features that TheSeven has written in to it. I suppose I can see the advantage of using it when you have a mixture of GPUs and FPGAs, though.
I used cgminer briefly before I shut off my GPUs for good last fall, so I've definitely missed some of the recent developments there. Does it have a WebUI like MPBM, allowing you to manage every single configuration option and monitor every stat remotely, even from a smart phone? Does it have better documentation? Have you seen the simple graphs TheSeven has built using an munin plugin for MPBM (one example of this visible at
http://cognitivemining.com/)? Has anyone done that with cgminer?
That said, I'm frankly blown away by hashking's pledge, but wish he wasn't shouldering the burden on this bounty so much. Since he wants cgminer support and has been loyal customer, we want to help him get it. 20 BTC is a lot for us with our margins as they are and so much money tied up in our current production run. And, as TheSeven said, offering it as a straight forward bounty instead of a discounted board was intended to be more generous than just a board at cost because one can receive the bounty either without buying a board at all (e.g., remote access) or using a board that one already bought. At least that was the intention. The 20 BTC has been sent to hashking's address.
I hope this sounds fair and reasonable to everyone, especially hashking. Please let me know if you feel otherwise!