bump

Thats a good question.

You need to keep 2 physical machines to attach the fpga boards too. However I assume you are correct in saying that it doesn't make sense to keep the graphics cards in there. Weirdly FPGA.contract do have GPUS on the go (http://contract.fpgamining.com/?page_id=34).
Oh, and in another rectification, accordding to the wiki (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison) a real life quad 5850 machines pulls 700 wats but only generates about 1360 MHashes.

The case for FPGA boards as I understand it:

ATI 5850 can give about 400 MHashes and uses about 200 watts. (ie at best 2MHashes/watt)

Dual FPGA X6500 gives about 200MHashes and uses 20 watts. (ie. at best 10MHashes/watt)

If we were to keep 2 rigs, and sell the other 11 at... $450? each. That'd give us $4950 which buys us 9 Dual FPGA X6500. So we would go from...and I'm really speculating here, assuming quad 5850's on 13 machines...
4x400x13=20800MHashes peak output

To 2rigs+FPGAS giving (4x400x2)+(9x200)=5000MHashes peak output.

In terms of power, I believe Tawsix quoted about 700 Watts per rig. So we would go from 700x13=9100Watts to (2x700)+(9x20)=1580 Watts.

Long story short we would have a drop of about 75% in btc generated. Our efficency per wat would go from 2.3MHashes/watt to 3.2 MHases/watt. Thats almost a 40% increase in efficiency.

My brain is too tired to turn that into dollars. And I may be making a million basic mistakes in my calcs, feel free to correct me. Long story short, I guess we might become profitable again, but the amount of bitcoins we would generate would be tiny. Tiny amount of bitcoins, and weak bitcoin values, means very little return on investment. To me, liquidation still seems a better option.

/discuss

Esteban Prieto

Lots of yelling and shouting in this thread which I am not enjoying.

Personally, i'm thankful to Tawsix for having started SIN, and I continue to be confident he has my best interests as an investor at heart. I believe its the vocal minority we are seeing represented in this thread winding each other up.

With regards to Tawsixs question about FPGA boards, I woulde vote for selling off all the rigs+graphics cards bar 3, and then using those three as the redundant heart of an FPGA cluster.

If it makes people happier, I would support you posting a picture of the hardware that we have. But realistically, you'll probably get the same group of angry shouting people telling you that you borrowed / photoshopped the image.

Regardless I would suggest you ignore the shouting people, and go the FPGA route, given that the vote has gone against liquidation.

Regards,

Esteban Prieto

Completely speculative post here, but just trying to get the ball rolling. If SIN were to be liquidated, I believe there are 13 rigs to be sold? As I understood it, these cost around $900 at the time of purchase. Accepting devaluation due to the riggs now being second hand, and slightly dated, would it be reasonable to see a return of $450 per rigg? If that were the case, that would mean $5850 dollars. I'm a little unclear as to how many shares are owned and by whom, but I believe that around 2000 shares were sold in the IPO, and so Tawsix should own another 2000?

If any of the above is correct that would mean liquidation would result in 5850/4000=$1.46 per share. So that would mean about 0.67 bitcoins per share? Which isn't a horrific loss from the original IPO.

Like I said, speculative post to encourage discussion...

A cheaper alternative, about to enter production:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Looking for some feedback on my freshly started blog. It's "Unique Selling Point" is that I try to summarise each post in a humorous cartoon at the start of each post. Please feel free to leave me feedback both here and in the Blog comments.

This blog is intended as personal project to encourage me to write and draw more. Feel free to tell me if you hate it, its meant to be a learning experience in running a regular Blog

http://briefbitcoinnews.blogspot.com/

Looking for some feedback on my freshly started blog. It's "Unique Selling Point" is that I try to summarise each post in a humorous cartoon at the start of each post. Please feel free to leave me feedback both here and in the Blog comments.

This blog is intended as personal project to encourage me to write and draw more. Feel free to tell me if you hate it, its meant to be a learning experience in running a regular Blog

http://briefbitcoinnews.blogspot.com/

The difficult bit is... I so want this to be true....

A lot of very bullish commentary here unsuprisingly as we are all Bitcoin lovers
I however would argue that Bitcoins recent blaze of publicity starting from its parity with the dollar, all the way up to the MTGox fiasco has bought a lot of attention and new users which have pushed value upwards. As the both the spectacular and the distasters die down, I would expect a downwards trend as some adopters drift away.

With the zip, I imagine you can just extract it into the same directory as you did the old version, but just tell it to overwrite?
I used the executable to install, so when new versions come out, I simply use the windows uninstall feature (which leaves the wallet.dat in place) and then run the new executable.

I'm somone who shoulda been in bed hours n hours ago, but having discovered Bitcoins just can't priser myself away from the computer