Quote from: mike_la_jolla on August 07, 2018, 05:01:34 PM

Quote from: gotminer on August 07, 2018, 01:04:11 AM

Quote from: Rabinovitch on June 27, 2018, 06:03:57 AM

Quote from: jmigdlc99 on June 26, 2018, 07:04:17 AM

Not sure if i remember correctly but you might have some luck checking out the FPGA discord group: (https://discord.gg/25DpDCS). Not sure if thats where i saw it, but i once saw downloads links to bitstreams from that or some other discord group.

Anyway, just stumbled upon the Zetheron website recently. Congratulations to whitefire, senseless, GPUhoarder, and everyone else that has pushed this to succeed. Hopefully this is a step towards further decentralization away from ASICS.

I'll check it, of course, thanx. Don't get me wrong, but I hope that 4% fee is high enough to make all possible downloads easily accessible for each potential donator (aka cryptoFPGA end user)...

Should be way less. Like a lot less.

Curious. On what basis do you make this statement? "Should be way less. Like a lot less." Given what I know, 4% seems like a pretty good deal.

Having been a GPU miner for some time myself, I know how frustrating/irritating it can feel to see your hardware pay out development fees. In this case, I think a sharing a simple calculation could be helpful. Realize that with each FPGA being equal to 10-16 1080TI's, hash rates can overwhelm networks quite fast. In my case I mine with 12 FPGA cards in my garage, and the typical coins I am developing for can handle about 250 FPGA's each before profit drops by 50%. If I mine in secret, then I get the full profit from my 12 FPGA's. If I release a public bitstream for Coin-X (as an fictional example), then let's say that 250 people start mining that coin with 1 FPGA each (which is the most the coin's network can support in this example).

Let's see what happens with a 4% fee on the typical coin that can support 250 FPGA's.

Case 1: I mine in secret, I get the full profit from 12 FPGA's
Case 2: I release the bitstream for coin-X publicly; I keep mining coin-X with my 12 FPGA's, plus I get 4% of the revenue of the 250 public FPGA's (0.04 * 250 = 10). So now I essentially 'have' 12 real FPGA's + 10 'virtual' FPGA's = 22 FPGA's. BUT, since the network hash rate doubled, the profit for each FPGA is now half of what it was when I was mining in secret. So my 'new' 22 FPGA's are reduced to just 11 FPGA's if you compared them to when I was mining in secret. This is less than the 12 FPGA's I started off with.

So, with a 4% fee, I actually make less by distributing the software publicly than I would by mining in secret. The development fee would have to be more than 4% (in some cases way more) to actually make more by making software public.

This is why, in the past, FPGA miners only mined in secret. But people like GPU_Hoarder, Senseless, and myself, are doing this because we believe in Crypto and we want to fight the ASIC companies and centralization. And FPGA's are the best way to fight ASIC's because they make ASIC's way less profitable to develop.