I've given the serial# idea more thought and refined it a little.

I'll make a web page where vendors can retrieve unique firmware images. These will have a serial# and a unique unlock key embedded.

When vendors run their burn test they'll use my proxy as pool and serial# as user id. This can be automated easily.

Initially the firmware will throw away 10% of shares until the unlock key is passed to it by the proxy. At that point it will rewrite and remove the code that throws away 10%. The unlock key will be provided by the proxy automatically when the amount mined passes the fee value, which currently would be about 2 hours.

Vendors or customers are always welcome to send more using the proxy/serial# (I won't complain) but after the initial burn time it will never be required. End users would never even know this occurred, unless they register their own new Klondike they built to receive the firmware directly.

After I've reached my reward target I'll release the firmware source and anyone can update to the totally open version as they like.

This method has the advantage that it forces vendors to run at least a minimal burn in time or else the customer would be receive a unit that runs slow.

I think this is more robust than my initial idea, and almost transparent to vendors/customers.


This sounds great to me - I would use some of zefir's kind donation towards this as well. I didn't want to spend too much on it but if it's shared amongst a few then it's quite workable. I think a good 100MHz Dual trace (1 or 2 GSs) model would be ideal. My reading so far seems to indicate the Rigol 50 or 100MHz models are much favoured due to their deeper storage memory. I view having one as a hedge against problems arising later. It's probably possible to just use my Logic Analyser but a scope would allow much more thorough diagnostics, particularly on the power supply.

The Hong Kong / China sellers who use EMS are well situated to get one here fast enough and without terribly ridiculous shipping fees. I'm going to do some more reading now and try to narrow it down. There is some local sellers as well and I'll have a look but typically they sell stuff like this for 50% higher than the online price.