Quote from: cypherf0x on May 19, 2011, 08:42:25 PM

FPGA clusters work, but... they're so expensive that you'll likely never recoup your investment.

The FPGA approach is the high tech way, but what if there was a way to do it simply? The double SHA-256 is what needs to be accelerated.

There are cryptographic accelerator/security chips that will do SHA-256. They may not be as fast as a FPGA or graphic card chip but they have a huge advantage over both in two areas

They're cheap
They're very low power

So what if you can only get 500KH/s out of it? It's worthless right?

Wrong, considering some of these chips cost less than a dollar and they're tiny so you can fit a whole lot of them on a board. Yes there's IO considerations and other design requirements but those can be handled.

If you factor in the cost of power and hardware for current mining setups it's plausible to be able to create a stackable board at near the same cost point though using a fraction of the power.

And yes, this is going to be open source/open hardware. The difficulty is going to keep going up making the power hungry GPUs less cost effective for mining. Which means if you have the desire you can download a design and build it yourself if you so desire.

Anyone with hardware skills is welcome to join.

On fundraising, the current bitcoin stock system is crap. On that the project will sell shares of the future project mining operations. The shares will be PGP signed by the master project key and will later be transferable to a stock platform should a user friendly/accessible one be produced.

If you want to be part of the hardware or software team degrees are a plus but completed well documented projects are worth as much or more.

We need general support roles too.

If there is enough funding the standard development platform with be Altium as it will cover the whole process including FPGAs should one be included on board for management. If it's on a shoestring then it'll be a hardware team vote (or whatever the majority of us already have)

There will be a lot of IC sampling and prototyping involved (Aka, the fun part) with the focus on relatively inexpensive chips already in mass production. This is a research project meaning iterations of smaller less expensive prototypes before taking those lessons learned into making a larger board with more resource investment to loose. I'm choosing to do it this way because of lots of experience with projects. The big ones tend to fail, but the ones that encourage quicker iterations of working prototypes tend to survive based on the psychology of having successful attempts.

A tiger may be able to eat something big, but a colony of ants can do the same job more efficiently.

I like this idea. I have the capital to fund the project, and this sounds fun. I'd like to talk in private if you would PM me your contact. Thanks.