The performance claims and prices are unrealistic

mrb

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Quote from: pcm81 on January 30, 2013, 12:41:31 PM

Quote from: mrb on January 30, 2013, 01:01:49 AM

Quote from: pcm81 on January 29, 2013, 11:56:40 PM

Quote from: MrTeal on January 29, 2013, 11:46:35 PM

You know that 1110 hours is only a month and a half, correct?

Yes i do, but by the time you add in the cost of electricity, occasional down time, the designers profit margin etc, you are talking close to 6mo to pay for your ASIC chip.

Which is why BFL is selling ASICs (for an instant profit) instead of mining with them for months to recoup their investment. Congratulation for logically deducing that BFL's business actually makes financial sense, therefore is realistic!

PS: will you promise me that you will write an apology, once I receive my ASICs from BFL in the next few months, proving that you were wrong? Grin

Please specify what "few months" means in real numbers. I don't think you will get 4.5GH/s for $150 price tag at 1000MH/J as the Jalapeno is specced here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be the "doom cryer" or a pessimist, I would LOVE to see ASIC products to be available for bitcoin. I just don't think it will happen. By ASIC i mean true asic, not FPGA conversion.

I see no point in continuing this discussion. I tried to reason with you but you avoided to answer all the technical arguments I spent time writing down in this post explaining that ASICs are very plausible. Besides, it is now proven that you were wrong. As widely reported today, "it happened": jgarzik, a core bitcoin developer, has received the first ASIC unit, and is mining with it as we speak. So, please stop trolling the forums.

pcm81

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Quote from: mrb on January 30, 2013, 01:01:49 AM

Quote from: pcm81 on January 29, 2013, 11:56:40 PM

Quote from: MrTeal on January 29, 2013, 11:46:35 PM

You know that 1110 hours is only a month and a half, correct?

Yes i do, but by the time you add in the cost of electricity, occasional down time, the designers profit margin etc, you are talking close to 6mo to pay for your ASIC chip.

Which is why BFL is selling ASICs (for an instant profit) instead of mining with them for months to recoup their investment. Congratulation for logically deducing that BFL's business actually makes financial sense, therefore is realistic!

PS: will you promise me that you will write an apology, once I receive my ASICs from BFL in the next few months, proving that you were wrong? Grin

Please specify what "few months" means in real numbers. I don't think you will get 4.5GH/s for $150 price tag at 1000MH/J as the Jalapeno is specced here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be the "doom cryer" or a pessimist, I would LOVE to see ASIC products to be available for bitcoin. I just don't think it will happen. By ASIC i mean true asic, not FPGA conversion.

mrb

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Quote from: pcm81 on January 29, 2013, 11:56:40 PM

Quote from: MrTeal on January 29, 2013, 11:46:35 PM

You know that 1110 hours is only a month and a half, correct?

Yes i do, but by the time you add in the cost of electricity, occasional down time, the designers profit margin etc, you are talking close to 6mo to pay for your ASIC chip.

Which is why BFL is selling ASICs (for an instant profit) instead of mining with them for months to recoup their investment. Congratulation for logically deducing that BFL's business actually makes financial sense, therefore is realistic!

PS: will you promise me that you will write an apology, once I receive my ASICs from BFL in the next few months, proving that you were wrong? Grin

abbyd

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Damn, people here know their sh*t! A bit of FUD/BS here and there, but some good debates!
If only the NSA agent on this forum would post, and bring us a few years into the future...

A few thoughts:

* OP's post title could be applied to ANY technology industry: cars, phones, etc. - IT'S CALLED MARKETING.
* I doubt anyone here is particularly concerned with export restrictions - this is bitcoin, not a Corporation X board meeting!

Transisto

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Quote from: pcm81 on January 30, 2013, 12:10:38 AM

Quote from: hardcore-fs on January 30, 2013, 12:05:55 AM

You know......

With so many f*** Crypto/Hash and ASIC experts in this thread... by now the planet should be flooded with bit-coin producing ASICS

Please just go buy an FPGA development board and build a demo engine ... or at the very least go do some research.
At the end of it.....you may even be able to have a decent conversation about clock buffers.........

Hold on a sec, I promise i will reply. Just give me a few moments to google what a clock buffer is/does.

No need to, I think what he meant to say is GTFO.

There has been dozens and dozens of people who did extensive cost analysis already, Thank you anyway.

Even if it took 2 year to pay for your said ASIC R&D, remind yourself bitcoin isn't going to stay in the XX$ range forever and some people will want do it even at a lost to secure the network.

pcm81

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Quote from: hardcore-fs on January 30, 2013, 12:05:55 AM

You know......

With so many f*** Crypto/Hash and ASIC experts in this thread... by now the planet should be flooded with bit-coin producing ASICS

Please just go buy an FPGA development board and build a demo engine ... or at the very least go do some research.
At the end of it.....you may even be able to have a decent conversation about clock buffers.........

Hold on a sec, I promise i will reply. Just give me a few moments to google what a clock buffer is/does.

hardcore-fs

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You know......

With so many f*** Crypto/Hash and ASIC experts in this thread... by now the planet should be flooded with bit-coin producing ASICS

Please just go buy an FPGA development board and build a demo engine ... or at the very least go do some research.
At the end of it.....you may even be able to have a decent conversation about clock buffers.........

pcm81

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Merit: 0

Quote from: MrTeal on January 29, 2013, 11:46:35 PM

You know that 1110 hours is only a month and a half, correct?

Yes i do, but by the time you add in the cost of electricity, occasional down time, the designers profit margin etc, you are talking close to 6mo to pay for your ASIC chip.

MrTeal

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You know that 1110 hours is only a month and a half, correct?

pcm81

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Quote from: Korbman on January 29, 2013, 01:42:36 PM

Quote from: pcm81 on January 29, 2013, 12:59:55 PM

To build a real ASIC it will be $1-$2 million in startup costs. With current bitcoin design 25 coins per 10 min plus transaction fees, call it 30 coins per 10 minutes, 180 coins per hour at the rate of $20 per coin we are talking $3600 per hour for full network capacity. How long you think it would take to make $3million, which is what end user would endup paying for ASIC? We are talking about 1000 hours to pay for hardware development cost alone with free power. And this is assuming that the ASIC will crush all other network capacity, which in reality it will not exceed 75%-90% of. The market is too small, it will simply not be worth the investment.

Where in the hell are you getting your numbers? I've reread this paragraph a couple times and I still can't piece together your thought process...

1) You don't need $1 million to develop an ASIC...though I suppose it would help.
2) You calculated (poorly) the full output of the network in terms of $$ to somehow justify hardware development. Why would this even matter?
3) I can't even...

Quote

And this is assuming that the ASIC will crush all other network capacity, which in reality it will not exceed 75%-90% of. The market is too small, it will simply not be worth the investment.

No. Just...no.

Users will buy hardware to make money. Would you buy $1000 chip if it did no good for you? The network capacity is relevant, because the only way a chip maker will comit to designing and making a chip is if they can sell enough of them to justify the R&D cost.

Do some math:
network btc is 150 btc/hr, which is $2700/hr. Your fraction of this would be based on your hash ratio to network total. Let's make the most favorable assumption that ASIC will drive all GPUs and FPGAs off the grid, so 100% of network hash rate is coming from ASIC. If total N asic units are made, the R&D cost per chip is X/N. Lets say that X is $1million, so R&D cost per chip is 1,000,000/N. When you buy 1 chip you get 1/N network capacity and so you are getting $2700/N/hr. Which means just to pay for R&D cost you will have to run your ASIC 370HR with FREE electricity. In reality ASIC will not have 100% of network hashrate, your electricity is not free and your actual cost will be at least 3x the RND cost since you need to pay for hardware itself. Which basically boils down to 370*3/F =1110/F Hours. F is the hashrate fraction of ASIC devices to the rest of the network. So in the most ideal case it will take you say 1110 hours of hashing with free electricity to pay for your ASIC chip.

mrb

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Quote from: pcm81 on January 29, 2013, 10:50:51 PM

Quote from: mrb on January 29, 2013, 04:17:28 PM

No. The SHA-256 part of the ASIC that I pointed to was designed in weeks, not 2-3 years. It is open source and just a few hundred lines of VHDL: https://cryptography.gmu.edu/athena/index.php?id=source_codes

Also, yes, BFL can, and probably did, spend about $1M developing their ASIC so far. They have received more than $1M of preorders (proven), plus additional venture capital (according to them). They can definitely foot the bill.

Also, the Avalon team seems to have been able to do it for less than $300-400k (excluding salaries), based on their price quotes from TSMC with poorly obscured prices ( https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1381782 ). This validates anecdotal evidence of private wealthy individual engineers having designed their own ASIC for personal projects for only a few hundred thousand dollars.

Bottom line, yes Bitcoin ASICs are definitely financially doable by teams with the funding of BFL and Avalon. If you doubt this, I encourage you to bet against the "BFL is real" bet (see link in my signature) - you would make a killing if you are right

Nice try. I can design a nuclear reactor in couple days, i really can; but it does not mean I can build one for less than $5 billion and faster than 5-10 years.

That chip doing 73 Mhash/J was more than merely designed, it was built! Go look at the die pictures!

pcm81

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Quote from: mrb on January 29, 2013, 04:17:28 PM

Quote from: pcm81 on January 29, 2013, 12:46:47 PM

Quote from: mrb on January 29, 2013, 01:39:43 AM

Quote from: pcm81 on January 27, 2013, 09:29:48 PM

Lets do some basic math:
For existing FPGA design the best can be had is 23MHps/J. There is no reason to anticipate an improvement in FPGA power efficiency, yes, there can be marginal reduction of overhead and the FPGA can be scaled up, but it's efficiency will not increase all that much. Based on existing designs we can anticipate 25MH/J for FPGA. There is nothing special abut ASIC, most ASIC vendors just use a custom programmed FPGA; this is called FPGA to ASIC conversion. So at best ASIC will be 50MHps/J;

You are wrong. A real-world SHA-256 130nm chip, non-optimized for Bitcoin, has already demonstrated 73 Mhash/J: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/best-demonstrated-efficiency-1290-mhashjoule-95762 Merely scaling down this non-optimal design from 130nm to 65nm would multiply the Mash/J efficiency by 4 (because efficiency is linearly proportional to the transistor junction area), making it 292 Mhash/J.

Then it is not hard to imagine that optimizing the chip for Bitcoin (ie. two SHA-256 with no high-speed I/O since the same data block is hashed over and over locally, merely incrementing the nonce) would improve the efficiency by a factor or 2 or 3, therefore making it 584 Mhash/J or 876 Mhash/J.

These numbers are not far from BFL's claims (1000 Mhash/J), making them plausible.

And with 2-3 years of design, prototyping as well as about $1-$2 million start-up cost you can do it.

No. The SHA-256 part of the ASIC that I pointed to was designed in weeks, not 2-3 years. It is open source and just a few hundred lines of VHDL: https://cryptography.gmu.edu/athena/index.php?id=source_codes

Also, yes, BFL can, and probably did, spend about $1M developing their ASIC so far. They have received more than $1M of preorders (proven), plus additional venture capital (according to them). They can definitely foot the bill.

Also, the Avalon team seems to have been able to do it for less than $300-400k (excluding salaries), based on their price quotes from TSMC with poorly obscured prices ( https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1381782 ). This validates anecdotal evidence of private wealthy individual engineers having designed their own ASIC for personal projects for only a few hundred thousand dollars.

Bottom line, yes Bitcoin ASICs are definitely financially doable by teams with the funding of BFL and Avalon. If you doubt this, I encourage you to bet against the "BFL is real" bet (see link in my signature) - you would make a killing if you are right

Nice try. I can design a nuclear reactor in couple days, i really can; but it does not mean I can build one for less than $5 billion and faster than 5-10 years.

mrb

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Quote from: pcm81 on January 29, 2013, 12:46:47 PM

Quote from: mrb on January 29, 2013, 01:39:43 AM

Quote from: pcm81 on January 27, 2013, 09:29:48 PM

Lets do some basic math:
For existing FPGA design the best can be had is 23MHps/J. There is no reason to anticipate an improvement in FPGA power efficiency, yes, there can be marginal reduction of overhead and the FPGA can be scaled up, but it's efficiency will not increase all that much. Based on existing designs we can anticipate 25MH/J for FPGA. There is nothing special abut ASIC, most ASIC vendors just use a custom programmed FPGA; this is called FPGA to ASIC conversion. So at best ASIC will be 50MHps/J;

You are wrong. A real-world SHA-256 130nm chip, non-optimized for Bitcoin, has already demonstrated 73 Mhash/J: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/best-demonstrated-efficiency-1290-mhashjoule-95762 Merely scaling down this non-optimal design from 130nm to 65nm would multiply the Mash/J efficiency by 4 (because efficiency is linearly proportional to the transistor junction area), making it 292 Mhash/J.

Then it is not hard to imagine that optimizing the chip for Bitcoin (ie. two SHA-256 with no high-speed I/O since the same data block is hashed over and over locally, merely incrementing the nonce) would improve the efficiency by a factor or 2 or 3, therefore making it 584 Mhash/J or 876 Mhash/J.

These numbers are not far from BFL's claims (1000 Mhash/J), making them plausible.

And with 2-3 years of design, prototyping as well as about $1-$2 million start-up cost you can do it.

No. The SHA-256 part of the ASIC that I pointed to was designed in weeks, not 2-3 years. It is open source and just a few hundred lines of VHDL: https://cryptography.gmu.edu/athena/index.php?id=source_codes

Also, yes, BFL can, and probably did, spend about $1M developing their ASIC so far. They have received more than $1M of preorders (proven), plus additional venture capital (according to them). They can definitely foot the bill.

Also, the Avalon team seems to have been able to do it for less than $300-400k (excluding salaries), based on their price quotes from TSMC with poorly obscured prices ( https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1381782 ). This validates anecdotal evidence of private wealthy individual engineers having designed their own ASIC for personal projects for only a few hundred thousand dollars.

Bottom line, yes Bitcoin ASICs are definitely financially doable by teams with the funding of BFL and Avalon. If you doubt this, I encourage you to bet against the "BFL is real" bet (see link in my signature) - you would make a killing if you are right

Korbman

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Quote from: pcm81 on January 29, 2013, 12:59:55 PM

To build a real ASIC it will be $1-$2 million in startup costs. With current bitcoin design 25 coins per 10 min plus transaction fees, call it 30 coins per 10 minutes, 180 coins per hour at the rate of $20 per coin we are talking $3600 per hour for full network capacity. How long you think it would take to make $3million, which is what end user would endup paying for ASIC? We are talking about 1000 hours to pay for hardware development cost alone with free power. And this is assuming that the ASIC will crush all other network capacity, which in reality it will not exceed 75%-90% of. The market is too small, it will simply not be worth the investment.

Where in the hell are you getting your numbers? I've reread this paragraph a couple times and I still can't piece together your thought process...

1) You don't need $1 million to develop an ASIC...though I suppose it would help.
2) You calculated (poorly) the full output of the network in terms of $$ to somehow justify hardware development. Why would this even matter?
3) I can't even...

Quote

And this is assuming that the ASIC will crush all other network capacity, which in reality it will not exceed 75%-90% of. The market is too small, it will simply not be worth the investment.

No. Just...no.

pcm81

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Quote from: Phinnaeus Gage on January 28, 2013, 01:59:18 PM

Quote from: squeept on January 28, 2013, 01:55:18 PM

As a computer engineer (the kind of engineer that actually knows about the topic at hand), I call bullshit on pcm81 having any idea what he's talking about.

Sorry, pcm81, but the other camp's marshmallows are lookin' mighty tasty. I may have to head on over there to make sure they're not using any of my barn wood as fuel. That would piss me off.

Look on the bright side: at least get some mashmallows, since we ain't getting ASIC past vaporware phase anyways...

To build a real ASIC it will be $1-$2 million in startup costs. With current bitcoin design 25 coins per 10 min plus transaction fees, call it 30 coins per 10 minutes, 180 coins per hour at the rate of $20 per coin we are talking $3600 per hour for full network capacity. How long you think it would take to make $3million, which is what end user would endup paying for ASIC? We are talking about 1000 hours to pay for hardware development cost alone with free power. And this is assuming that the ASIC will crush all other network capacity, which in reality it will not exceed 75%-90% of. The market is too small, it will simply not be worth the investment.

pcm81

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Quote from: mrb on January 29, 2013, 01:39:43 AM

Quote from: pcm81 on January 27, 2013, 09:29:48 PM

Lets do some basic math:
For existing FPGA design the best can be had is 23MHps/J. There is no reason to anticipate an improvement in FPGA power efficiency, yes, there can be marginal reduction of overhead and the FPGA can be scaled up, but it's efficiency will not increase all that much. Based on existing designs we can anticipate 25MH/J for FPGA. There is nothing special abut ASIC, most ASIC vendors just use a custom programmed FPGA; this is called FPGA to ASIC conversion. So at best ASIC will be 50MHps/J;

You are wrong. A real-world SHA-256 130nm chip, non-optimized for Bitcoin, has already demonstrated 73 Mhash/J: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/best-demonstrated-efficiency-1290-mhashjoule-95762 Merely scaling down this non-optimal design from 130nm to 65nm would multiply the Mash/J efficiency by 4 (because efficiency is linearly proportional to the transistor junction area), making it 292 Mhash/J.

Then it is not hard to imagine that optimizing the chip for Bitcoin (ie. two SHA-256 with no high-speed I/O since the same data block is hashed over and over locally, merely incrementing the nonce) would improve the efficiency by a factor or 2 or 3, therefore making it 584 Mhash/J or 876 Mhash/J.

These numbers are not far from BFL's claims (1000 Mhash/J), making them plausible.

And with 2-3 years of design, prototyping as well as about $1-$2 million start-up cost you can do it.

squeept

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Still going. This is fairly amazing. I kind of want to track him down, find out where he supposedly has a job in the engineering field, and alert his superiors that he's vastly unqualified for his job.

Seth Otterstad

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Hate that when someone just wastes a whole bunch of people's time. No idea why I read this whole thread.

Transisto

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Quote from: pcm81 on January 28, 2013, 10:48:50 PM

Hashing and encryption ARE two different things. In fact though, they are both used when you log into your online banking account.
1. Your computer gets the public RSA key of the server and encrypts the AES key with it.
2. Sends the key to the server together with your password, which is encrypted with AES.
3. Server decrypts AES key, using that key decrypts your password, it hashes your password and compares the resulting hash to its stored hash. If two match, you are authenticated.
Server does not actually store your password, just its hash, this way if hacker steals the list of all password hashes, he still cant log in...

You seems to like explaining stuff even if said stuff isn't related in any ways to what you're replying to.

Just stop already,,, you're either off-topic or you're missing 2/3 of what you're trying to explain.

mrb

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Quote from: pcm81 on January 27, 2013, 09:29:48 PM

Lets do some basic math:
For existing FPGA design the best can be had is 23MHps/J. There is no reason to anticipate an improvement in FPGA power efficiency, yes, there can be marginal reduction of overhead and the FPGA can be scaled up, but it's efficiency will not increase all that much. Based on existing designs we can anticipate 25MH/J for FPGA. There is nothing special abut ASIC, most ASIC vendors just use a custom programmed FPGA; this is called FPGA to ASIC conversion. So at best ASIC will be 50MHps/J;

You are wrong. A real-world SHA-256 130nm chip, non-optimized for Bitcoin, has already demonstrated 73 Mhash/J: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/best-demonstrated-efficiency-1290-mhashjoule-95762 Merely scaling down this non-optimal design from 130nm to 65nm would multiply the Mash/J efficiency by 4 (because efficiency is linearly proportional to the transistor junction area), making it 292 Mhash/J.

Then it is not hard to imagine that optimizing the chip for Bitcoin (ie. two SHA-256 with no high-speed I/O since the same data block is hashed over and over locally, merely incrementing the nonce) would improve the efficiency by a factor or 2 or 3, therefore making it 584 Mhash/J or 876 Mhash/J.

These numbers are not far from BFL's claims (1000 Mhash/J), making them plausible.

Topic: The performance claims and prices are unrealistic (Read 5311 times)