And that is why you don't trade through a market maker. Especially not for short term.

And they probably wanted us to believe that this is the paper they used as inspiration:
http://www.ee.usyd.edu.au/people/philip.leong/UserFiles/File/papers/sha_fpl02.pdf

Problem is that this paper is pretty old, and the hardware they mention is outdated. If other people in this forum with much more modern FPGAs couldn't come up with a feasible implementation, there is no way that this could be competitive. This paper was written before GPGPUs became common.

And I couldn't find a more modern version of this Pilchard module.

Uhmm... how does it feel to get free bitcoins from a giveaway after a scam?  I am not sure I want to know...

Yes, it seems to be better now, thank you, really awesome work!

The site is awesome, just a little "bitching":

The order book graph could just show the relevant part: anything further than +/- 10% of the current price is meaningless, as by the time the price gets there most of the orders disappear. This way the graph in the important range could be bigger and easier to read.

And my laptop isn't really new but chrome is using some 30% cpu when the page is open. It would be great if you could optimize that.

You can try it by connecting to port 8332 with telnet: after one request has been serverd, bitcoind will close the connection. Even worse, as long as that connection is open it won't accept an other one. Everything is done on a single thread, you can see it in rpc.cpp,  at ThreadRPCServer2()

I am, and this is what I read out from the first post too

On the other hand let's hope that libcurl can properly reuse the connections kept open, otherwise the new problem will be the overhead of creating/destroying the threads for each connection.

Not that if my bitcoind patch worked

OP said that the connections are between the mining pool server and bitcoind. I suppose the rpc port of bitcoind isn't exposed to the internet, therefore can't be flooded. Also, most of the time it makes no sense to leave it open for anyone.

I just took a look. The Boost asio library is used, so to avoid replacing everything (and introduce a different style of coding), one should probably stick with that. The whole thing is running on a single thread, and as soon as a request is answered, closes the connection. Doesn't seem too efficient, indeed. I tried starting a new thread for each request, but there is some glitch somewhere. Unfortunately I am not too familiar with boost

Is it? No one is preventing you from disclosing your identity. And the system isn't relying on anonymity, the cryptographic mathemagics works anyway. Remaining anonymous is just an option.

It isn't that much different from "real-world". There are tons of services where you pay in advance because you trust the other party as you know that it would hurt their reputation too much too just walk away with the customer's money.

This works even better in case of a repeated contract: For example if an online service with a subscription of 3$/month suddenly stops giving value for your money, you just stop renewing and they loose a customer. You know that, they know that, they know that you know it... etc ad infinitum. And things keep going smoothly.

I am not saying that what I wrote solves all the problems (one-time contracts such as ebay is a different story), but this argument itself does not prove that bitcoins are worthless.

Anonymously registered domain, simple wordpress site hosted at goDaddy with no information on what they are planning to do with the money except some general bullshitting in a few lines.

Smells like a Ponzi scam...

edit: oh... I just read the signature of the post. wtf?

address is in my sig, thanks

the -1 after the second colon means reverse order, but in python the number after the first colon is not the last element of the subrange, it's the first element not included. So job.data[75:63:-1] will give you the [75th, 74th, 73rd ... 65th, 64th] elements.

btw, do you plan to make the C version public?

You can make some, but very-very little. The GPU in your machine has no support for the technologies needed so you can't use it. And as others have said nowadays CPUs can't compete with GPUs, especially a mobile CPU from an older machine.

I am pretty sure they can do much more. If a single mid-range fpga can house an entire pipeline and get 50 MH/s, any ASIC must be able to overperform that at least with a factor of ten.

Considering that the design is very simple, and we don't need to push any limits (as we can simply use more chips instead) probably the manufacturer's team could do it relatively cheaply, it's mostly an automatized process anyway.


I think the one-time costs are higher. Unless we go for some structured ASIC, which indeed can be done from a few $100K. But the problem with structured ASIC is very similar to the fpgas: we have to pay for all the unused stuff (memory blocks, hardware multipliers, etc) that we don't need, increasing the price and lowering performance. And the projects return would still be threatened by others who starts making real asics.

I am also not sure that hunderds of people would commit the neccessary amount. Buying a video card is a much lower risk, as it can be sold anytime and has uses for other purposes.

I have only worked with FPGAs, but I don't think you are daydreaming.

btw, does anyone know why the "Will fund ASIC board for mining community. Need Hardware devs." topic has been closed?

It depends on the technology used. There is a rather large one-time, non-recurring expense, and then some price/unit for the actual manufacturing. Of course the more you can pay upfront, the better technology and lower per unit cost you get later. I made some research yesterday (and I was just about to open such a topic ), but unfortunately the manufacturers are pretty secretive about their prices.

But it seems to me that the lower end starts somewhere around $100k one-time cost which gets you a structured asic. This will give higher performance than an average fpga, but far from a real asic, and also the unit cost won't be that low. (but much cheaper than an fpga) As far as I know, ArtForz is about to order such a design.

For a real ASIC however you will need to pay a lot more upfront. (a million bucks? couldn't find exact quotes anywhere), but you could absolutely own the network with dirt cheap ICs. The technology is the simplest possible: only digital gates, no analog stuff, you don't even need memory blocks, also no complicated IP is neccessary, everything can be done and tested on FPGAs. The thing could easily run at least 100-200 MHz, even with an older technology (you don't want to pay for a 45nm process), and probably a few full pipelines could fit in. That means several hundres of MHash/sec on each chip, possibly more. The chip can be in a very simple case, with low density pinouts, so it could be soldered very easily, even with DIY methods. But that would take a lot of time with for example a thousand chips   If you had the money to manufacture the IC, making the PCB is pocket change. And bamm, you have a lot of panels, each of them with around a hundred chips, each chips putting out 100s of MH/sec. There is a topic somewhere discussing whether the CIA could commit 50% of the full network power. Well, they certainly could.

There is a free fpga design out there already, that's a good starting point. What it lacks is a mean to distribute the work and collect the result, as it currently has some hack relying on the debug features of the fpga and its dev panel. But it wouldn't take really much time to come up with a full design that can be quickly converted to any format the manufacturer needs.

Also, if you want to be safe, you probably want a design that can be somewhat reconfigured, so if the mining project fails, you still have an IC that can be used for other tasks requiring fast SHA-256 computation.