If you want to play with FPGAs the Spartan 6 LX9 MicroBoard is a really good place to start.  You can google it, Avnet makes/sells them.  They're less than $100

I'm planning on trying to avoid FPGAs just because of expense though it's possible that one will end up as the control chip.

Nice!

Though to repeat what was said elsewhere FPGAs are not cost effective unless you already own the hardware so don't run out and buy dev boards.  It's a little more involved than point and click to get them running.

It's a made up number, I don't know the performance of those chips.  It may take more, but they'll still use less power.

Another alternative is to buy ATIs development hardware and make a board that uses the GPUs purely for computation.

Well the idea is R&D.  There are a lot of encryption and security based chips that will do SHA-256.  It's actually prototyping boards and testing their speeds.

I stand corrected then, I haven't really put time into researching attack vectors yet.

Actually it was 25% and an NDA on the implementation.

If I did a screencast of the system then someone could say it was faked with a script too.  In the end there are always people who don't believe despite whatever you show them.

It would be trivial for them to do as well.  Once you get >%50 of the computational power you can basically counterfeit transactions and as long as > 50% of the network validates it, it's valid to the protocol.

I think it's a reference to the >50% computational power attacks on the network

FPGA clusters work, but... they're so expensive that you'll likely never recoup your investment.

The FPGA approach is the high tech way, but what if there was a way to do it simply?  The double SHA-256 is what needs to be accelerated.

There are cryptographic accelerator/security chips that will do SHA-256.  They may not be as fast as a FPGA or graphic card chip but they have a huge advantage over both in two areas

• They're cheap
• They're very low power

So what if you can only get 500KH/s out of it? It's worthless right?

Wrong, considering some of these chips cost less than a dollar and they're tiny so you can fit a whole lot of them on a board.  Yes there's IO considerations and other design requirements but those can be handled.

If you factor in the cost of power and hardware for current mining setups it's plausible to be able to create a stackable board at near the same cost point though using a fraction of the power.

And yes, this is going to be open source/open hardware.  The difficulty is going to keep going up making the power hungry GPUs less cost effective for mining.  Which means if you have the desire you can download a design and build it yourself if you so desire.

Anyone with hardware skills is welcome to join.

On fundraising, the current bitcoin stock system is crap.  On that the project will sell shares of the future project mining operations.  The shares will be PGP signed by the master project key and will later be transferable to a stock platform should a user friendly/accessible one be produced.

If you want to be part of the hardware or software team degrees are a plus but completed well documented projects are worth as much or more.

We need general support roles too.

If there is enough funding the standard development platform with be Altium as it will cover the whole process including FPGAs should one be included on board for management.  If it's on a shoestring then it'll be a hardware team vote (or whatever the majority of us already have)

There will be a lot of IC sampling and prototyping involved (Aka, the fun part) with the focus on relatively inexpensive chips already in mass production.  This is a research project meaning iterations of smaller less expensive prototypes before taking those lessons learned into making a larger board with more resource investment to loose.  I'm choosing to do it this way because of lots of experience with projects.  The big ones tend to fail, but the ones that encourage quicker iterations of working prototypes tend to survive based on the psychology of having successful attempts.

A tiger may be able to eat something big, but a colony of ants can do the same job more efficiently.

Very true, but what if there was already a source of something equivalent to high speed SHA-256 ASIC.

*bell ring*
We have a winner!

Two FPGA clusters went live.

I can't really describe the feeling of learning that the two initial units were for prototyping and there were RACKS of them to be used when idle.

That's what happens when two FPGA clusters are added.

Yeah, send me a PM with your email.

I never said I fit 1.5 engines on a chip.  I apologies if some of the numbers implied that since they were ballpark estimations based on short runs.

You're free to doubt, it's your time spent.

I don't know where you came up with 133MHz out of MH/s.  There is the 'about' and 'around' meaning values are not absolute.  The speed average was a bit high initially.  You're also making design assumptions.  There are highly optimized commercial hashing cores available for FPGAs too.

It's actually about 90MH/s over time per pipeline but the speed average jumps around a bit at first but settles over a longer run.

If anyone is looking for an inexpensive FPGA to experiment with try the SPARTAN-6 LX9 MICROBOARD.  I've gotten a lot of messages asking about it and these boards are USB and cost less than $100

They're expensive enough you have to call the sales office to order them.