Topic: Will fund ASIC board for mining community. Need Hardware devs. - page 2. (Read 41463 times)

Is it the money value that you think is the problem or sheer number of investors?

I think if the whole community can't come up with at least 1000 potential investors each risking $6000, then I think the whole bitcoin project isn't ready for ASIC yet. It needs more time for its natural growth.

We need to be careful here, I will give you an extreme example:

if only 50 people would invest each $100,000 they could put the whole bitcoin project in danger. Not in a way that they could ruin the whole thing, but just takeover mining and collect 40% of all coins in each round, then reinvest and keep growing, basically to the point where this small group of 50 people would hold 90+% of the market. By that time majority of the GPU miners would stop already, which could put the whole trust of the network into hands of 50 individuals, each only putting up $100,000 at the begining.



I understand it might not be an easy task, but we won't know unless we come up with detailed plans and see what community thinks. Right now we are only talking approx costs of the whole thing to get a frame work done.

Same here, funds are at the ready :-)

I would invest if A) it were feasible
                        B) the numbers were more concrete e.g cost defined

Sounds fine. The problem is finding 1000 investors. Does not sound like an easy task.

Here is my idea.   Read it twice   It might still be somewhat messed up, but you will get the idea. I will also round up the numbers and explain why. If we go by JoelKatz numbers project upfront cost $2 mill, each unit would cost $650 to produce.

I will write on the example of 1000 investors. Each investor would invest $2500 for upfront cost and 5x$700  to receive 5 units of the product when it would be produced. Each of the 1000 investors would invest $6000 and receive 5 units of 5.x Gh/s at 250 W, so approx 25 Gh/s at 1250 W for $6000. This way we would have $2.5mill cash to develop and presold 5000 units at $700 each which is around production cost plus some spare.

When we would ship this 5000 units to initial investors, we would start taking pre-orders for a next batch of at least 1000 units at $2000 each for public / investors. There would be a time delay of at least  4 weeks between each batch of 1000 units. When this pre-order fills all 1000 units are shipped to their owners. Then we start taking pre-orders for at least 1000 units at $1750 each and repeat the process. Then at least 1000 units at $1500. We would stop lowering the price at $1000 per unit unless something drastically would change, like a new competitor or whatever.

*If there would be more than 1000 orders we would fill all before start taking pre-orders for next batch at a lower price.

The time delay between each shipment, would need to be calculated more precisely ( I used an estimate ),  is for the difficulty factor changes. It needs to be calculated in the way that the guys who would buy $2000 unit  would have time to earn enough coins compared to the next batch units that would sell for $1750 and so on.


Where would all the profit go, if there would ever be any?   

Back to original 1000 investors. Company would buy bitcoins on the open market with all the profits and transfer it to the 1000 investors every quarter. Keep in mind that this example is for 1000 initial investors for $6000 each. If there would be more interest we would redo the math. If for example there would be 1500 investors, we would do $1500+ 4x$700. There has to be a minimum limit of at least 1000 investors so everyone could invest plus this would keep majority of the hashing power spread out. We don't want to get a small group to run ASICs while the rest would still use GPUs and would have to stop mining soon after.

Each investor would have 10000 shares in the company, which they could later on buy/sell on the open market for bitcoins, so everyone could be a part of this company. We would develop and add this exchange later on. This way we would get ASIC and everyone could get in on the action. Initial 5000 units would add 25 Th to the network, then each 1000 batch would add approx 5+ Th.



This is just a nutshell, community would work out every possible detail so it would be best for everyone involved. There is a lot more details I already know, but I don't want to write an essay here.

What about professional

Willing to commit to a 10.000 USD per month purchase for 6 months, providing the conomics is better than the 7xxx graphcis card looks like. Bank guarantee can be provided

What about financing it through shares? I mean, creating a sort of a cooperative that pays dividends in cards, so people pay the money and at the end when it is developed they get payed in cards. That way you are making sure you will get a number of sales before starting the project. Sort of like testing the waters to know if the demand is there.

I've never really mined, other than 0.01 btc off an old GPU that took me 24 hours to generate.

But even I'd be interested in mining if I could buy 56 GHash/s for $15k.

Just need to figure out a way to direct the resulting heat into my swimming pool.

Stack a bunch of these into a baseboard heater fan case, and allow me to control it with an external thermostat, and I would buy it today.

It could be done. The chipset would just need to be able to talk to a mining controller, which could be the bitcoin client for solo mining. The work that needs to be done beyond the hashing is minimal. The equivalent of a $40 wireless router would do it.

Since you are counting $400 for 4 chips and $150 for the rest (for a total of $650) would it be posible to include a chipset that allowed a ethernet connection and a very simple webserver (like the chipset in a home router) instead of the usb chipset. This way you could have an independent device just connected to the ethernet network and configured by a simple web interface. Im not very informed about the prices but I dont think it would push the cost too much and it would avoid the need for a computer (saving energy and money). The question I guess is if that simple chipset could handle the mining software load.

The USB port is strictly for work units to the ASICs and shares back to the PC. It would need its own power supply, cooling, and so on. The bandwidth needed to and from the unit is negligible. Essentially, it would need a stream of work units of 8KB every 12 seconds from the PC and return a share, about 300 bytes, about every second. A serial port would work as well. (Sorry, out of time. Numbers not double-checked. Hope I made no mistakes.)

If I understand him correctly, this card would have its own power supply, USB port would only be used for PC connection.

Irrelevant. YOu can always put in a power supply. Actually no, USB can not power 50 watt.

That said, I would NOT stop my datacenter operation plans - I would rpelace cards with more asics

@JoelKatz

5.6ghash at 250 watts definitely makes business sense for miners as well at $1500.
I'd replace all my rigs, stop paying datacenter rent and run those at home.

But can a USB port (even a reinforced one) actually supply 50 watts let alone 250w? My biggest doubt.

Correct. To do it right would require designing a fully-custom ASIC and having it manufactured on a high-end fabrication line capable of producing chips with hundreds of millions of transistors running at 350MHz. Every step in that process, and there are many of them, costs money. (1/4 of the cost is salary, by the way.)

Essentially, an ASIC would mean a chip produced in almost precisely the same manner as the way a high-end GPU was produced four years ago, except it would be designed for bitcoin mining from the ground up.

The numbers are solid, the problem is the uncertainty. Also, every unit you sell is weakening your market.

Posting so I can follow this thread...

JoelKatz, you seem to know a lot on this subject.  If I understand you correctly a $2 mill investment would resulted in a card with 4 ASICs 1.4GHash/s per chip at 50 W each, for a total 5.6 GHash/s 250 W  USB plug unit. Production cost would be $650 each. Would you care to comment on why this would cost up to $2 mill to do it right.

Did anyone do the math if this is done and sold for $1500 each if the math holds up and this would be a good investment for miners? Problem I instantly see is the difference between fist 1000 units sold  versus the last 1000 units sold, because in the meantime difficulty factor would double if not triple, while the product would still sell for the same price.

They're designed for a different purpose. Here, the goal is not to do a SHA as quickly as possible or over a large amount of data but to perform a particular operation requiring two SHAs on a small amount of data as many times as possible concurrently. The FPGA miner already has the basic design -- it can do one double hash per clock cycle (per instance). It's just a question of how high the clock speed can be and how many of them can fit on an single ASIC. (I'm oversimplifying a bit, but the general point is sound.)

The current design uses an assembly line approach. While SHA step 5 is being done on none 12, SHA step 4 is being done on nonce 13, and SHA step 3 is being done on nonce 14. Nonces come in the front from a counter and once the pipeline is full, complete once per clock cycle. The actual SHA logical operations would be wires on the chip. Each SHA XOR would be an XOR gate. I don't think you can do better than that.

Has anyone considered the engineering may be partly done I've seen a few things like these with hardware sha units.

I doubt

The main problem will be price - comared to the 7xxx AMD series.

But if htaht is ok, I would take some. Currently setting up a not too small operation.