Quote from: whitefire990 on July 30, 2018, 01:23:05 AM

Quote from: colomine on July 30, 2018, 12:19:24 AM

@whitefire990

I have checked out your website recently regarding bitstreams. I should say I am very confused if not disturbed having realized that there are no bitstreams available for public yet other than for 0xTocken. Hope you could bring some clarity here. When are you planning on releasing bitstreams for those top profitable algorithms you announced in May - Keccak, Trubus, Phi1612 and Skuncash? Or did you change your mind for some reason?
It is obvious that we are interested to have bitstreams tfor mining top profitable FPGA minable coins available by the time the first batch is delivered or soon after. Otherwise these FPGAs (considering the price, short warranty and difficulties with resale) will only be a huge risk and a waste of money for non-developer miners...

Thanks

It takes quite a lot of work to transition a bitstream from private use to public use (with dev fee and anti-piracy). Since my original post May 1, the crypto-landscape changed dramatically. Luxcoin forked away from Phi1612, making Phi1612 useless. Baikal began mining Keccak with X10 ASICs, making Keccak non-profitable (and also Digital Cruncher released Keccak for the FPGA as well). The few coins on Skunkhash collapsed, making it so that Skunkhash can only support 2-3 FPGA's at the moment. The network hash rate on Tribus went up 4x (and also Digital Cruncher released Tribus first), so what this all meant is that it was better to focus on high-profit coins for public release rather than package-up old bitstreams that are useless. 0xToken is available now, and I am releasing another algorithm on August 11, and four more in early September. I am no longer going to announce which algorithms will be launched, since it was my original announcement of Phi1612 that was a major factor in LUXcoin forking (in hindsight I should have just launched the bitstream without ever announcing it first).

I hope that clarifies things. If you still want Tribus and Keccak, you can download them Digital Cruncher's github. Phi1612 and Skunkhash are available on Sprocket's github, although it isn't really worth installing them.

So basically what I'm getting from all this is, it's very time consuming releasing bitstreams for the public which makes FPGAs vulnerable to forks just like ASICs are. FPGA can't compete with ASICs and can be forked with fairly good success since developers working on bitstreams is scarce..

As a miner you're basically a sitting duck twiddling your thumbs hoping a bistream is released before the coin forks again.

Miners like STAK, SRB and Cast (for gpus) can release new revisions with new algos within hours of a fork.

Say Cryptonight V7 forks again to V8. How long would the wait time be for a updated bitstream?