But do you hold the vote before or after the ASIC is deployed in significant quantity?
In effect, whoever decides the timing, decides the outcome of the vote.

-rph

In practice that just means the optimal mining technology will be the world's best FPGA, instead of the world's best fixed-function ASIC.
Unless you're capable of creating a substantially different POW function every couple days to defeat skilled, well-funded, and persistent FPGA designers (and C-to-RTL synthesis tools)...

Anyway, I believe it's morally wrong to change the POW 2+ years after launching a coin, if you did not at least mention that possibility when creating it. You would destroy many hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the "evil" ASIC(s) which, in the long run, will make all cryptocurrencies less secure by encouraging private, secret, centralized ASIC development. And then there's the whole slippery slope aspect - if we can change the POW, what else can we change? How about we increase the block reward 10X so I can haz moar coinz plzz, at the expense of savers?

A significant advantage of existing cryptocurrencies is that the key attributes were made fully public up front, held constant, and not politically revised by any party (so far). If you start making up the rules as you go along, you've just created a less centralized & possibly more democratic, but still politically manipulable, imitation of a Central Bank and fiat currency. Maybe there is demand for that, maybe not, but if you want that, you should at least have the decency to launch it as a new coin, rather than corrupting an existing one.

-rph

I really like the general idea, but, with a constant price and an enormous supply of shares on both sides -
I see no rational reason to buy this until shortly before "judgement day".

-rph

This project rocks. 248MH/s, 39.5C, 1.279V (girard on a -2C)

-rph

ET, I could use some bitstream tech support when you get a chance.. C22 no worky..

-rph

Don't believe everything you read  Bitcoin ASICs are marketing vaporware.
I doubt they will exist at all in a way that threatens the latest FPGAs,
at least not for the next 9 months or so.

-rph

This thread is not dead. It's just been hibernating.  

I am very happy to announce I've been working on a full-custom ASIC project for the past 6 months.
We're estimating 1,000TH/s for around $0.14 (intro pricing), using about 20W, shipping in 4-6 weeks.
The HW/SW for that is still Top Secret, but, I do have some new PCB porn to share with you guys.
Here's the latest single-FPGA carrier, pasted and populated, but not yet skillet reflowed:



-rph

Sweet! That's at ~1.26V, so only around 8.5A (long term average) on the core supply?

-rph

At the moment, nobody has published free/open gerbers for an FPGA miner. Schematics are available for Icarus though.

-rph

And Xilinx told me that 45nm performance was not strongly voltage-sensitive..

-rph

It helps but logic/RTL verification is one of the easiest steps in a modern ASIC design.
The lower level physical/analog design is what fucks over most amateur ASIC designs.

-rph

Only if it's full custom below ~90nm, which means several million dollars in mask costs, a 6-9 month
mfg period, and a pretty good chance that the first chip is useless, unless you know WTF you are
doing and poached a rockstar team of people making $200k+/yr away from companies like
Broadcom, Marvell, Intel, etc. And managed to convince your investors they wouldn't be better
off funding something else for a larger / lower risk market.

Given the odds of BFL pulling that off - I'm going to keep buying FPGAs.
I will fear a true full custom mining ASIC if/when it exists, but the FPGAs
will certainly have paid for themselves way before then.

-rph

A bitcoin fpga mining project will take at least 3 months of your life.   Even with the open source RTL and SW now.

-rph

BFL's performance per watt is only about half of a 45nm FPGA, and 1/4 of a 28nm FPGA.
It looks fine today compared to 45nm GPUs and I'm sure their marketing talents
will generate some short-term sales, but 45nm and 28nm FPGAs can and will destroy this thing technically.

The payoff for a BFL unit today (832MH/s, $599, constant price/difficulty) is around 7 months.
28nm FPGAs will be mining in large numbers well before then.

-rph

In Spartan6, the ternary addition uses only ~2ns. The routing delays - and ISE's inability to
consistently minimize them - are a bigger problem.

-rph

There are at least 3 FPGA miners shipping today, with ~2X the MH/W of BFL:

BitcoinFPGA

If BFL takes off and starts driving difficulty - no worries - all of these units will still be profitable.
If these Spartan6 designs begin to drive the difficulty - they will make the BFL units unprofitable.

It doesn't matter if it was cheaper per MH up front, once it's losing money every month.

-rph

FPGA fabric frequencies have been stuck around 200-300MHz for 10+ years
because, while the LUTs are still getting (slightly) faster, the wires between them aren't.

So you have to go wider instead of faster.

-rph

When you have 10k to spend, you can get FPGA miners for a lot less than $1.67/MH.

Unless you have essentially free power/cooling -- it really does not make sense to
invest that much into a new GPU rig.

-rph

Give me a break.

Its performance per watt is less than half of a 6s150 FPGA design.

It's very likely that these BFL units will become unprofitable later this year,
as more power-efficient technologies start to drive the network difficulty.

-rph

IMO the block reward reduction "singularity" is one of the only real design flaws in Bitcoin.

Halving the reward in one shot will create an incentive for rational, profit-maximizing miners
to organize a 51% attack on the network, to maintain or even increase their mining profits
through evil means.

This possibility exists even today of course, but miners seem a lot more likely to organize and
attack right after (or right before) the mainstream network kicks them in the nuts
by halving the reward.

Maybe we will see a fork of BItcoin, which keeps the block reward at 50BTC, with a very high %
of the mining power moving to that - basically playing chicken with users to try
to make them switch to the 50BTC-for-life fork, by reducing the hashrate on the 25BTC
network to the point where someone else can 51% attack it.

To minimize these risks - the block reward should have been constant, or reduced gradually,
a little bit each block. People are less likely to notice, protest, and organize
against a gradual change. That is how governments become increasing large and oppressive,
fiat currencies become increasingly worthless, etc.

-rph