Topic: Starting a new FPGA mining farm/contract! Cognitive Resurrected on[Havelock] - page 96. (Read 300616 times)

Hi Garr,

Since BTCT does not send email notification to shareholders for new motions, I guess some of the shareholders don't even know about the new motions going on.

I think you have to either do an announcement on BTCT like
but just make it un-viewable to public, so that BTCT can send out an email to notify all the shareholder.

Or, you can just send everyone an email from your email distribution list.

Cointerra isn't the weekly trend, Garr has been working on that deal for a long time, according to his posts.  He hinted at the existence of this deal a long time ago, when he originally proposed the first 100 shares of COG.F2.

Jumping on the "dump avalon" bandwagon, on the other hand, I agree, was a decision made much more quickly, I recognize your concerns there.

The thing is, math is math.  The best argument for dumping avalon at this point is "if cointerra fails, having ~1TH/s of avalons starting in a month or two aren't going to drasticaly change our outcome", because as my calculations show, we can't even run them for very long. at best we shut them off after just 4-5 months of running.  It'd literally be better to bank the BTC and invest in some other opportunity at that time - or just do it now (via labcoin, bitfury, whatever else we can get).

One can diversify by buying shares of different mining companies - so if you don't like the low-basket ratio of cog, sell just a few shares and buy some of something else as well.  I hope you would agree even if cog had nothing but cointerra orders, if Garr can support his claims in the near future, that alone makes cog an extremely valuable investment and thus a strong part of any well-balanced mining company portfolio.  If cog has the best deal with cointerra, far better than *any* other mining company (which again, Garr has implied but not yet provided solid evidence of) then cog absolutely should spend most if not all of their funds on cointerra because it is the best bang for their BTC.

I understand your skepticism toward all the unproven companies, but Bitfury delivered its August orders on time and I believe October orders are still open.  Even if Avalon claims the order will be sent soon, no one knows when that is and waiting would keep us at the mercy of Avalon's incompetency. 

You seem to be the only person who objects to the Avalon refund.  What disadvantage can you possibly see to an immediate refund vs. waiting an undetermined amount of time for an order of increasingly outdated chips? 

Well of course goats are stubborn.  I was just kidding around with you!   

Cointerra's all-pro ASIC dream team is in no way comparable to BFL's or Avalon's motley crew of amateurs.

Just being associated with Avalon is bad for Cog's share price.  People want to boycott them now and forever.

Possibly relevant: http://thegenesisblock.com/avalon-refunds-22000-btc-2-9m-to-asic-miner-customers/

Maybe we could change our order to 2nd gen chips instead?  projected 10x higher hashrate, and almost assuredly lower power usage too (though still not quite as good as cointerra, should be a good hedge against cointerra failing).  Another possibility to raise a motion for?

I agree, discussion is key.  Also, I agree generally with more-eggs-in-more-baskets.  I think the value of the avalon basket is pretty low even if it does come through, and if cointerra "pulls a BFL" there are still many other companies delivering hashing power to the network.

Garr seems to have put most of our eggs in the cointerra basket because we are getting "a very good price" with them (though exact numbers are still pretty hazy).  If the sense folks have is that we want COG.F to be "a different basket" than COG.F2, then maybe we should ask garr to try to get one of the cointerra competitors (like labcoin? I dunno, I'm not up on the options) with those funds.  Or even BFL monarchs?  I wouldn't be supprised if Garr doesn't ever want to buy from BFL again, but we're talking a small % of COG's funds, right?  Also, we might have chip discounts, etc.?

So what do you guys think, do you want to see a motion to diversify into more than just cointerra, even if it is just 10% of our funds or whatever?

I was under the impression that if Cognitive doesn't take the refund the chips still won't ship anytime soon, if at all.  Is that wrong? 

If exponential growth continues, isn't it a safe bet that the price of BTC will follow it up, up, up?

IOW, if the price of BTC levels off, what would incentivize/pay for continued exponential network expansion once negative marginal returns/diseconomies of scale kick in?

Goat, stop being stubborn and accept that you lost your bet on Avalon.  Be grateful that at least chip refunds are coming!

Get back on the horse and buy some Cog.F2.   

Fair enough.  According to TGB again, Cointerra's chips do 2TH/s on 1200W.  (1200W * ($0.02/1000W*h)) => $0.024/h,  $0.024/h / (2000GH/s * 60s/m * 60m/h) => $0.00000000333/GH.

Compared to the previous number, we have 5.299e-7 versus 3.33e-9, or ~160 times more efficient.

6 months out, 1678 mil diff, => 1678mil * 2**32 * $0.00000000333/GH * (1/1bil GH) => $23.999.

So at a difficulty of 1678 mil, doing the number of hashes needed to discover a block on 110nm chips will cost $3817 and doing it on 28nm chips will cost $24.  3817/24 => ~160, so our numbers match expectations.

Of course, this assumes cointerra hits their power/hash goals, etc, since we don't know if they have a working proof of concept yet, and we know from BFL companies have failed to reach predictions before.

EDIT: if we assume 60% growth over the next year - so 12 months out - we would be at 28147mil diff.  This is VERY unlikely - exponential growth cannot continue forever.  Nonetheless, if it happened, we'd have $402.56 per block.  Of course, as I argued above, discovering blocks would still be very very slow, but even at insane exponential growth, we wouldn't be turning our miners off even after 12 months from now (9months from getting them).

EDIT2: how slow?  at 1TH/s (for fair comparison) and 12-month diff (28147mil) we expect 0.000714 BTC/day, but a single cointerra device is 2TH/s, which would make 0.0014BTC/day, and if we get the full 1048TH/s garr has predicted, we'd be at 0.749BTC/day even 12 months from now.  You can do the math yourself to fill in the gaps if you want.

jesus there's a cognitive atm now?!?!

And please update cognitivemining.com. I have no idea how many funds COGNITIVE atm has.

According to http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/, avalon batch 3 (which, if I understand correctly, are based upon the same chips), produce 65GH/s at 620W, or 105MH/w.

At best, electricity costs $0.02/kW*h, or 0.02/1000W*h, so (620W*($0.02/1000W*h)) => $0.0124/h to run 65GH/s, or 0.0124$/h / (65GH/s * 60s/m * 60m/h) =>$0.0000005299/GH.  At a difficulty of 100mil, the average number of hashes to solve a block are 100mil * 2**32 => 429496729600000000H => 429496729GH, which means a block "costs" $0.0000005299 *429496729GH => $227.59 but is worth ($130/BTC * 25BTC) => $3250.  If the diff increases 60% per month (currently it is increasing at 77% per month according to TGB) then in 3 months it will be 100*(1.6**3) = 410mil, and so on, so I made this table:

If profit is value - electric cost:
today 100mil => (3250 - 228) => $3022 per block found
3 months 410mil => (3250 - 933) => $2317 per block found
4 months 655mil => (3250 - 1491) => $1759 per block found
5 months 1048mil => (3250 - 2385) => $865 per block found
6 months 1678mil => (3250 - 3817) => turn it off, dawg.

Not only does each block net less profit, but we also expect to find blocks slower.
Time to find a block => diff * 2**32 / (hash per s) = time
At 1TH/s, we find:

Today 100mil => 100mil * 2**32 / (1TH/s) *(1m/60s*1h/60m) => 119h to find a block => 0.20 blocks per day => 5.02 BTC/day
3 months 410mil => 0.049block/day => 1.22BTC/day
4 months 655mil => 0.030block/day => 0.7692BTC/day
5 months 1048mil => 0.0192block/day => 0.48BTC/day

So the point is, even 3 months from now, we'd be lucky to be making 2BTC/day, even though it is profitable it'd be better for garr to spend his time deploying hundreds of TH in hardware that won't have to be turned off in just 2 months later.  I am unconvinced avalon hardware will be actually hashing in less than 1-2 months from now if we don't cancel the order.

Summary:  I was wrong - the avalon chips will probably be profitable to run for 4-7 months, depending on network growth.  However, the returns will be so small, I'd still rather bet on future tech, as exponential growth cannot be sustained after 28nm, but we are already seeing 110nm stuff get left in the dust.

The decision is less clear cut, but I still feel like avalon refund is the way to go.  We already have a few batch 2/3 devices, right?  It's not like we have no avalon hardware, it just seems silly to keep putting money into the old stuff when we could instead put it into the better stuff.

Please correct any errors you find.

EDIT: typos

Avalon has been "about to ship" for so long the chips are obsolete.  That's why they're (finally) offering full refunds to everybody.

This situation is the fault of 'Why, I F'ed You' not Garr.

Lots of people lost lots of money, because of Avalon's failure to deliver in a timely manner.  Recriminations, bad blood, and hurt feelings abound.

But Cointerra is run by adults, not children like 'Why, I F'ed You!'

Let's write off Plan A (Avalon) and focus on getting the warehouse full of 500GH Cointerra chips hashing at capacity.   

You did not take into account liquid assets they own.

The other aspect to consider is the avalon chips aren't just slower, they are higher-power-usage as well, which means it will literally cost more electricity to run them than they produce in BTC very soon, if the network growth continues or even if it just grows linearly (it is currently exponential).  The avalon chips are not worth it because Garr would have to turn them off in a few months anyways, because they are not economical to run anymore.

A quick comparison with bASIC mining... looks like they are about on par now.

Cognitive
Total Hash Rate - 750 GH/s
Nr of shares - 10420
Hash Rate Per Share - 72 MH/s
Avg Day Price - 0.295 btc
==>  244 MH/btc
+1000 TH/s in Q1-Q2 2014, if CogF2 is successful.

bASIC
Total Hash Rate - 1435 GH/s
Nr of shares - 51625
Hash Rate Per Share - 27.8 MH/s
Avg Day Price - 0.121 btc
==> 230 MH/btc
+0.8 TH/s BitFury chips in October 2013.

Garr can you post an update on btct.co with the updated hashing power?