When you say 'the quality of standard containers is not the best,' do you mean like prefab Bitmain antboxes or similar hydro containers, dry coolers/heat exchanger or like the chassis of the miner itself?

Where would I go to see engineer reviews you mention?

Also anyone here have info on the chip specs for the S23 or any more details about hashboard/power supply design?

When i first heard about it in Vegas I was a shocked to see sub 10 W/TH. From a technical standpoint definitely impressive. I always expected Moore's Law wouldn't hold at *some* point due to quantum tunneling and other physical limits, but it seems like we're just not there yet.

Now it does seem to me that capital in mining really does flow primarily to the manufacturers and bitmain in this sense i think plays dirty to keep an unfair advantage in the marketplace. Their position of privilege due to the scale of being the early front-runner may be warranted, but I was told that they pushed Whatsminer out of the TSMC so that MicroBT was forced to go to samsung which does not have the same quality chips as TSMC. This imo makes it all the more impressive that whatsminer is able to compete given they are working with inferior chips... they make up for it with better board and chip design (I suppose).

So on the one hand, impressive that Bitmain keeps pushing these physical limits, but on the other it does feel like there are some anti-trust issues that don't allow for truly fair competition. Would be great to see some public pressure on TSMC to allow Whatsminer to source from them. Not sure where Auredine's chips are coming from, anyone know?

In any case, these new models do re-instantiate a prisoner's dilemma, where Bitmain is the prison guard and us miners are the prisoners constantly choosing selfishly (buy new machines) drive difficulty up and our profits down, instead of collaborate and boycott new machines (ridiculous premise i know, but theoretically...). We're just driving each other more and more to the brink and all the pubco's just play fiat games, diluting their shareholders and crowding us out, until the music stops and they can't keep up the charade anymore or move pivot to AI... in any case next halving will be v interesting. As a miner, i'm terrified...

I'm just interested in tracking how we got to the core client as it is today so all I care about is the Jan 9th release -- v0.1.0, as that's the code that first instantiated the network.

I've been working through v0.1.0 and it's been super educative tbh, highly recommend it.

I saw that v0.1.3 is on the nakamoto insitute link you provided above so I think i'm all set there (thx) as step two, but since the "first commit" you linked to on github just posts the entire v0.1.5 codebase, what's the easiest way to tell what changed from v0.1.3 to v0.1.5?

From then on I'm assuming all the changes are tracked through version control, even though early on it was all still pre-github...

Hope these comments are still germane to this thread as I'm moving away from v0.1.0.

I've been wanting to do something similar as an educational exercise: build the original satoshi client and then push the changes version by version to see how the client evolved over time.

This is the place I found to download the original client v0.1 : https://github.com/0xMagnuz/Bitcoin-v0.1/tree/master/bitcoin0.1

Slightly different than the OP, but if anyone has any resources related to this side-quest, or threads here on bitcointalk to go to, would be much appreciated.

I just wanted to post my thoughts somewhere and share a relevant anecdote from bitcoin++ last week.

I see the motivations against removing the datacarriersize limit as two-fold:

1. “Arbitrary data is not money and bitcoin definitely is money. The extent to which bitcoin [blockspace] can be used as not money is the extent to which it’s bad at being money because they’re competing over the same resources.” (Mechanic)

2. Noderunner’s right to choose what transactions they may or may not want to relay, i.e. “not on my lawn.”

Regarding point 1, the question to me is what exactly constitutes <arbitrary data>? All data that is not directly related to spending coins? Should all arbitrary data be considered spam? Isn’t spam subjective?

I heard Luke Dashjr’s respond to this last question, “No, there’s an objective difference. Bitcoin’s design allows miners to include up to 95 bytes per block of arbitrary data in the coinbase. That is completely different from spam which is encoding this arbitrary data to look like something it is not to deceive nodes into accepting it. If you submit a JPEG as a transaction it will be rejected by every single node. You have to obfuscate it and make it look like something it’s not to make it accepted.”

Regarding point 2, given that Bitcoin Core is the default client used by the vast majority of nodes on the network, removing the datacarriersize limit, would make it more difficult for Core nodes to *easily* limit the size of the op_return field. I take Greg Maxwell’s point here that there is some “serf thinking” involved in that Bitcoin Core does not give you these rights. The Bitcoin Core client is an open source tool that you can choose to patch, fork, and modify as you see fit. I think the defenders of the op_return limit are interested in the *ease* with which someone can make a decision in one way or another. In any case, I’ll leave my conclusions below my story below which I think is a nice illustration of the debate.

There was a project called GarbageMan presented at the bitcoin++ hackathon that forks a Knots node to impersonate a Libre Relay node by setting the node’s service bit to signal to other Libre Relay nodes that it is also part of the Libre Relay network (bit number 29). These Knots nodes, pretending to be Libre Relay nodes, prioritized Libre connections as their preferred peers. This way the “Garbage Men” could infiltrate the Libre Relay network to intercept transactions the Knots nodes consider spam, and throw them away. (Prez: https://www.youtube.com/live/cLLpmbg4KKk?feature=shared&t=2277)

This was an awesome project and clearly a fun jab at Peter Todd, who was one of the judges, the creator of the Libre Relay project, and also who opened the original PR to remove the datacarriersize limit.

Peter Todd’s argument was that filters would be ineffective on the mempool because you could just use services like Libre Relay to get around those filters. GarbageMan is a strike back that filters could be deployed to attack the Libre Relay network as well.

A couple presentations later, another project called MemCooler implemented a parallel straight-to-miner relay (a la Slipstream) over Nostr. Miners announce themselves on Nostr, where transactors can look up, select, and pay specific miners to mine their transactions. (Prez: https://www.youtube.com/live/cLLpmbg4KKk?feature=shared&t=3005)

During the Q&A, Peter Todd asked, “why not do an option that just broadcasts the transaction on Nostr and say hey [miners] please go mine it?”
“Uhmm I guess there is no reason not to do that.” Smile, “Just turn Nostr into the mempool.” Peter Todd, emphatically, “Sounds good to me!” then roared, “Let’s go fight GarbageMan!”
(Peter Todd’s Question: https://www.youtube.com/live/cLLpmbg4KKk?feature=shared&t=3344)

I’ve read a lot of Gmaxwell’s thinking on this debate from this forum and on reddit, and I think a lot of this boils down to the fact that Bitcoin is built to be censorship resistant. I totally get that policies express preferences in what transactions are relayed and this can increase friction for those transactions, but I don’t think it’s Core’s job to tool for that. I think the way this has played out with Knots forking Core, keeping consensus rules the same, but adding more options around filtering is a perfectly reasonable outcome. Why not have more clients? I understand that if a lot of people end up using clients that have significant changes around peer-to-peer networking and consensus rules, cough btcd, then that would be problematic, but I don’t think the answer to that problem is that we should resign from running modified, patched, forked or alternative clients…

Finally, if the real issue here is the spam, It seems the only way to definitively filter or block this would be through consensus rules changes or through centralized or homogenized block template creation. If block template creation is more distributed then you’re more likely to have people who mine non-standard transactions and it’s more difficult to gain a majority of mining nodes to only accept block templates of certain characteristics.

Bitcoin’s blockspace is a free market. I think people can and will express their political positions through their nodes, but that it is not Bitcoin Core’s job to outfit them with those tools.

bitcoin++ livestreams:

Day 1
Main Stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKQvDfmQkt8
Poolin Stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUQlBxWwlaU
Workshop Stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9bRVIXOhm0

Day 2
Main Stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsMujxqgHeQ
Poolin Stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2p_V0svDTo
Workshop Stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv429hE3r3U

Day 3
Hackathon Presentations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLLpmbg4KKk

I think conflating miner hosting, cloud mining and marketplaces.

Hosted mining like Compass or Sazmining sell you an ASIC upfront and then host it for you at one of their facilities. As you point out, this involves paying electricity and other hosting fees for them to cover the costs of running the miner for you plus a premium because they don't do it for free... All of this should get factored into your payback time.

Cloud mining services like BitFuFu and Bitdeer, are like front offices for bitmain mining farms that sell time of their own machines at a premium. They either self-mine or if a buyer shows up to purchase hashrate from them, then they sell their hashrate at a premium. I don't think you're likely to make money here, but maybe it's an on-ramp if you're paying in fiat or you're willing to pay the premium for coinbase sats...

Marketplaces like Nicehash, MiningRigRentals and Rigly also sell hashrate at a premium, but it's a two sided marketplace. You have miners from around the world that go to the marketplace to sell their hashrate where they set at what % over FPPS. Last I checked on Nicehash ~5% and closer to ~10% on MiningRigRentals. Rigly uses an auction mechanism to set the price.

I work at Rigly where we've been developing a hashrate marketplace for 3 years now. We've been trying to align incentives so that buyer's can mine at a profit, which is hard because that means miners have to take a loss, i.e. sell their hashrate for less than it will produce. The most straightforward way we found was to trade time preferences: hodlers have low time preference and miners have high time preference to grow and upgrade machines. We found sellers who are willing to sell their hashrate at a discount if they are paid upfront. Buyers provide miners liquidity at a fixed-rate, similar to a loan, and they pay you back in hashrate, where the buyer receives hashrate until they've mined the established fixed-return. Everything is calculated in sats using the daily hashprice as the valuation method.

Th important difference between hashrate marketplaces and hosting services, is that in marketplaces the cost of electricity, maintenance, and running the machines is abstracted out because it's only about how the seller market/commercializes the actual end-product, the hashes themselves. From an accounting standpoint, it's just about the top line, what's the revenue? Who is paying the machine's owner for the hash it's producing: their own fpps pool account, an individual paying the premium or a financier who's allowing them to upgrade equipment or new operations ahead of schedule.

I think this is well said. One point of differentiation that I think is not *just* semantic is that cloud mining is when a company sells it's own hashrate production. Two companies that do this currently are BitFuFu and Bitdeer (the second seemingly to a lesser extent). Both are bitmain ofshoots. Because Nicehash, MRR, and Rigly are venues where various independent miners go to commercialize their hashrate to individuals instead of pools, I think the term hashrate "marketplace" is more appropriate.



I work at rigly.io and we're working on providing as much information as we can about the hashrate for sale while not encroaching upon the miner's privacy.

Yeah the fact that pubco's can mine at a loss and just take out debt through convertible notes and other financing options means they can leverage tools from US credit markets and the financial industry that give them a yuuuge competitive advantage in the short to medium term, especially since they're just playing to increase their stock price. But I don't think it's very sustainable in the long run... my sense is that's why they are all pivoting so hard to AI/HPC now; they see the writing on the wall.



And yes, I agree that mining sustainably at profit is difficult and requires a lot of checked boxes, as you say. The list I provided before is by no means easy to meet, but i think it gives some good guidelines as to what's required to participate and stay in the game. My experience has also been that mining is a game of survival so you just need to be able to hold on and keep chipping away at your operating costs and integrate upstream as much as you can, then i think you can still play and win in the long run. I guess my point was that I wouldn't underestimate the average joe, anyone can play as long as they find the right conditions: I think that's kind of the point.

For those that are interested in mining without all this hassle, I've been building a hashrate marketplace, rigly.io. We have a new product that we're still in early stages of fielding called fixed-return mining where the idea is you can finance a miner by paying for their hashrate upfront and they will mine to your pool account until you make a fixed-return over what you paid for. You can think of it as interest paid in hashrate.

I disagree that i think mining for profit is gone or that you can't compete with the big PubCos, you can it's just not really with your bitaxe at home... You need to find an edge, and this means it really depends under what conditions you're mining, if you want to have something stable that you can actually project into the future you should aim for the following:

1. Power as close to (or under) 0.03/kWh as possible to compete with the majors
2. Scale... You need a place that hooked up to either a big transformer if you're on grid AT LEAST 1 MW or a large generator to put at least 300 rigs.
3. Stable voltage... (240V) you're going to blow out your PSU componentes (like MOSFETs) if you you have too much voltage variation.
4. Cooling... if you do air cool make sure you have analyzed your ventilation system in order to evacuate all that heat properly, oversize your airflow by a good margin, you gotta keep em cool!
5. Money... you need a lot of money to compete in mining. Having deep pockets or working with someone or multiple people with funds is key as you try and grow.
6. Try and get newer machines to maximize life cycle (payback is longer, but you'll make more sats in the end with a newer gen rig) and you'll be more insulated in market downturns.

I run a flare gas mining operation with sub $0.04 power and about 30 PH/s, with older rigs... shit's mad hard, mainly because of working in the oil field and generator issues, but mining economics can bite you in the ass real quick. It's a lot harder than it seems on paper, but as a bitcoiner, I also love mining.

Yes! We run team solo mining "block parties" at upendo.xyz you can point your hashrate there or you can also buy extra hashrate on our site to add to the party to increase the odds of finding a block. We source hashrate from rigly.io which is a hashrate marketplace.