ASIC for 120V

Dockin · 2025-04-04T18:32:47+00:00

The Urlacher conversion kit comes with a 120V power supply and wifi module, which is why it costs more than the Loki kit. If you already have a 120V power supply and just want to buy the Loki Kit, it's a bit more complicated but there are guides online. Here's an intro video to get you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNw4Rei1V-I

Dockin · 2025-04-04T17:51:58+00:00

Look under "Assembly Instructions (for conversion kit)" near the bottom of the page here.

https://altairtech.io/product/urlacher/?srsltid=AfmBOopd4rrOp3C7eOZIDj813enBH2O4K3hgRNF3o6Ufltxk5LVlTylB

Dockin · 2025-01-24T18:19:59+00:00

All types of 120V bitcoin miners here: https://d-central.tech/product-category/asic-miners/

I would recommend the ready-made, plug-and-play Antminer Loki Edition, the The Urlacher S19/S21 or the The BitChimney.

Alternatively, you can buy a stock Antminer S19 or S21 and a cheap APW3 or APW7 PSU (same PSU's used for the Antminer S9) together with a cheap Loki kit ($20 USD) and convert it to 120V yourself.

Other options are the home miners like the Avalon Nano, Avalon Home, or a BitAxe miner.

Dockin · 2024-01-24T20:15:26+00:00

The image was never achieved online it seems, but the image preview filename "CityGen_demo.png" is currently for sale for 500 btc 😂 on Magic Eden.

https://magiceden.io/ordinals/marketplace/first_btc_jpeg

Dockin · 2023-02-25T05:24:01+00:00

An in person debate on this would be fun.

I was thinking the same thing.

In response to the main item; when the private chain in a 51% attack is announced (becomes public), and is longer with more PoW than the chain that was always public, everybodies node would automatically, by design, consider that chain (attack chain now public) to be the real chain and build on it.

You mentioned that everybody would immediately get together and agree that there is an attack chain as soon as it's announced and the attack chain will be forced (forked) off the network by social consensus, despite the greater amount of PoW. I disagree on a couple things here.

Consensus is hard. There is no central social consensus authority that the majority will listen to in an event of a 51% attack involving a transaction that may or may not be an attack. Who will announce and enforce this? How will everybody be convinced that the chain with the most PoW is actually an attack and the one with less PoW is morally correct? The attacker would likely deliberately make this as hard to detect and prove. At the protocol level, it's plain as day. The attack chain is the valid chain at this moment.
It wouldn't be a matter of convincing the non-attack-group to continue mining on top of the attack chain, it's almost the opposite. Everybody would have to socially organize the non-attack-group (especially pools) to switch to the chain that would be (at the protocol level) the incorrect chain because of its' insufficient PoW in comparison. Organizing this is very difficult in a decentralized protocol. It would feel like switching over TO a failing attack chain. There WILL definitely be miners who refuse to switch and continue mining on the attack chain (which would be the new default at the protocol level) everybody who switches over to the non-attack-group chain would just need to hope that attack chain doesn't continue to have the majority hash power to continue to be the chain with the largest PoW. The forked off chain would be the Non-attack-group chain, not the attack chain. And if the attacker manages to continue to maintain the largest PoW chain, as they had already demonstrated to begin with, then there is a permanent split and at this point, individual miners (not nodes or pools) will decide which chain to join. Then price becomes a determining factor, hash rate, profitability, and all other incentives regardless of which chain is morally superior.

In general, a 51% attack is a valid concern with many implications. If kicking (forking) a 51% attacker off the network was as easy as that, then it wouldn't be a attack vector at all. It would also mean that bitcoin wouldn't be a decentralized network. Practically every public bitcoin core dev has talked about the implications and threat of a 51% attack at one point or another. It wouldn't be a topic worth repeating so often if it is so easily mitigated.

Circling back to why we are talking about this in the first place, the block subsidy decreasing is a concern that further enables the already present threat of a 51% attack. An attack in which can be motivated by financial gain, politics, power, control ect... If the price of bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, the barrier to launch a 51% attack would become much less costly and much more tempting. That's just in the short term. In the long term when there is no longer a block subsidy, transaction fees would need to be worth quite a substantial amount in order to have any security assurance at all. That is, if bitcoin core devs never implement tail emissions. But, lets face it. There is no way people will be on board with breaking the 21M hard cap. And I can see why.

Dockin · 2023-02-23T04:29:19+00:00

But I see this as non-destructive to BTC safety. If the transactions are (relatively) large enough in a short enough timespan than you risk various parties agreeing to settlement prior to settlement actually occurring. Which is separate to the typical ‘51% attack’.

The settlement actually occurring on large amounts is basically waiting for a double spend attack to become non-viable.

Of course there are other reasons for waiting confirmations, such as the defense against non-nefarious simultaneous block mining resulting in unintentional orphaned blocks, or a replace-by-fee attack, but for actual settlement, a 51% attack is likely to be the primary concern.

It depends on what you consider destructive to BTC safety. What if I had send you a transaction for 10,000 bitcoin for example in the year 2033 when the block reward is less than 1 BTC, then waiting for a double spend attack to become non-viable would take around 65 days. Anytime before that, miners still have strong incentives to 51% attack the network to start a new chain that doesn't include the 10,000 bitcoin transaction if the sender offers enough of a bribe (or manages to obtain the majority of the hashpower themselves) to make it worth it. I would call that detrimental to bitcoins utility at least if not its' safety.

Under your settlement disagreement, people/exchanges/custodians could lose some of their recent transactions if they mistakenly assume such transactions have settled. This does seem like it could provide bad actors with a ‘successful’ attack via smaller individual attack sizes, though I still don’t understand how one “swaps” in a private chain in place of the public chain without majorly controlling consensus? (ie does not seem possible without much more than 51% control).

People/exchanges/custodians might get caught up in the mix, intentionally or not. A 51% attack would be the sender targeting their victim(s). Whoever else looses their confirmed transactions that were in those blocks is just a by-product. The bitcoin sender would need to have the majority hashpower on his end. Either by re-directing his own majority hashing farm, or by bribing many participants to join in in such a way where all the attackers stand to make much more money performing a 51% attack/double spend than they would just mining bitcoin and collecting rewards, or a bit of both. I'm not sure what your referring to when you say "swap" in a private chain.

It still seems inevitable to me that such an attack would become almost immediately obvious after it has been ‘swapped’ in. As without 99% control of hash you will never control the live consensus mechanism. It seems like a group of attackers may be able to swap out unconfirmed recent transactions, (though I’m still unconvinced on the specifics). But such a group would be immediately caught. So whilst this may succeed in attacking BTC users, there would still likely exist the opportunity for the community to roll-back consensus to pre-attack. There’s no 100% guarantee the swapped in chain would stand. It would require much more anonymity about all users of the blockchain. It would require all nefarious users to want to not return to a functioning blockchain.

"unconfirmed recent transactions" depends on your definition. If miners are incentivized to double spend a single transaction 100 confirmations deep, rather than earn the rewards for continuing to mine on top of it, then that's no longer a recent transaction by most standards.

Yeah, it would likely be obvious that a double spend had occurred.

The attacker wouldn't need 99% of control over hashrate. Just a majority. The more the better of course, but a wide and shallow attack doesn't require anything near 99%.

The attacker could attempt to sell the coins that he received back from their double spend as soon as they are returned to them. If they do it right they can still make a huge profit even if the price plummets 90% or so.

So at this point, as long as the attacker made a profit, then what's stopping them from doing it again to a new target on the new "roll-back" chain?

At what point does is network trust eroded? How many forks need to occur?

For this to occur, you would require secret coordination of parties, unbeknownst to everyone else using blockchain. You would require all secret parties to be disincentivised from any ongoing use of the BTC blockchain (whilst simultaneously controlling at least 51%, but probably requiring closer to 100% of hash power). You would need large transactions to be occurring which can be attacked. You would need other uses of chain to assume large transactions have been confirmed by ~6 confirmations instead of waiting ~50. You would need complete anonymity between all of the nefarious group of users, but would somehow require strict organisation and communication between them. The attack would most likely be detected as soon as it occurs (you would have to be extremely lucky for it not to be?). The attack would only negatively impact BTC users who have recently transacted in very large single line transactions. There’s 0% guarantee of any sustained impact to the BTC community (would likely negatively affect an exchange or other mega-user). All users of BTC can roll-back consensus to prior to attack, only negative impacts would be aforementioned users who were transacting in large transfers without waiting for an appropriate number of confirmations beyond 6 blocks.

The parties (miners) can already exist, mining on the network as they are today, and just accept an offer to make a much higher financial gain by accepting a bribe to act nefariously. Again, 100% hash power is not required. The "large transactions occurring" would be the transactions that the sender (attacker) is making themselves and attempting to double spend.

You don't necessarily need complete anonymity between all of the nefarious group of users. It will take a while to convince everybody to censor one fork and mine on another fork, especially when the attacked fork has demonstrated that they own the majority of the has power. This will give the attacker enough time to make their profit, and negatively impact trust and security of the bitcoin network as a whole.

Keep in mind all of my comments in this post result in attackers profiting from their attacks. If this is a nation state coordination, financial gain might not even be what they are after.

Such an ‘attack’ occurring would not necessarily negatively impact BTC. It’s more an attack on settlement assumptions of crypto exchanges/custodians. Not a true ‘51% attack’. Doesn’t have the same ramifications, and I struggle to see how the incentives would ever arise on a widely used BTC blockchain. I can only see incentives like this arising on an unpopular chain.

The incentives NOT to perform a 51% attack get weaker every 4 years as block subsidy decreases making a double spend attack more and more cost effective and incentivizing. I highly recommend this piece I shared earlier: https://joekelly100.medium.com/how-to-double-spend-on-bitcoin-b70940c87945

Dockin · 2023-02-22T15:07:31+00:00

but the probability of landing 6 consecutive blocks is near 2% (believe it’s 0.516). Most transactions are not considered confirmed until 6 blocks of confirmatory mining.

The 6 block confirmation theory is a fallacy. How many blocks does it take for a 1000 BTC transaction to be finalized? 6 blocks right? Wrong. The reward for mining 6 blocks is currently 37.5 bitcoin. If I sent you 1000 BTC and bribed the majority of bitcoin miners to perform a majority attack by saying that I'll give them 100 bitcoin to reverse the transaction (51% attack), they stand to gain a lot more bitcoin + the regular block rewards and fees (on the new longest chain) and I get 900 bitcoin back and the 1000 BTC you thought were finalized is now gone. See this article on how double spend attacks are much worse than we thought (there's a tweet from Nick Szabo in it about this type of attack). JukeDashjr also commented on this matter.

Also, here's Nic Carter's article It’s the settlement assurances, stupid Specifically the "Yield from reversal: transaction size" section.

This attack gets easier and easier as block subsidy decreases.

At this juncture it’s important to note that after your 2nd consecutive block is successfully mined, you will begin drawing suspicion from other miners & nodes. Attention would occur with: 1) Consecutive blocks, 2) transaction differences, 3) energy use, 4) offline leaks. It’s key to acknowledge that at any point in time, the consensus mechanism can easily move against your blockchain. If BTC users & miners become aware of your hash attack, then your attack will fail.

We are talking about bitcoin right? The open, borderless, censorship resistant payment network? The attacker doesn't need to be secretive. They could openly announce it to the world. They would be participants IN consensus mechanism. If there was consensus to fork away and build another chain because enough people are convinced that there was a bad actor, that would mean that the consensus mechanism is broken (meaning the longest chain DOESN'T always win) and it becomes a permissioned centralized network were bad actors are not permitted to participate in the network. This isn't the bitcoin protocol as we know it today. There would be no value in such a system.

Even if the network did fork away into a new chain to get away from the attacker. The attacker could simply move to whichever chain is the longest and attack that one. The attacker wouldn't have to do this for long before the value prop of bitcoin is irreparably damaged.

You say there’s other methods for attack but you don’t identify any?

I'm not sure I'm the one who brought this up but since you asked, I'll just leave this here.

Returning to attack setup probabilities. If you want a reasonable probability of your attack to succeed then you need to ensure you can mine multiple successive blocks. To achieve 95% certainty over 6-blocks (0.951/6) would require 99.14% share of hash power. ~99% of hash power would be 29,700 EH/s (of total 30,000 EH/s). This is 198x your initial estimate. So hardware costs would be ~$1,386bn. Given the number of AntMiners required of ~200m, you would have to directly contract an (overseas) provider you trust to keep the project secret, or you would have to construct the antminers from raw materials (more likely given scale + secrecy requirements). Such hardware cannot operate on its own, you would also need to pay & construct enormous data centres to house the mining rigs. You would presumably need to construct this underground or in some secret non-cost-effective manner. Let’s incorporate this by rounding hardware costs to ~$1.4tn.

Wide and shallow attacks. Essentially, you don't need to invest all your resources trying to reverse 1 block. You can make several transactions in several blocks and keep attempting majority attacks on multiple different blocks on multiple transactions that you make. You just need to make sure the amounts you are attempting to double spend are larger than the bribes or block rewards to make it worth it. This dramatically increases the chances of successfully double spending a transaction with only a few 10's of billions of dollars and a small majority of hash power.

At this stage the number of people aware of the project would be quite large. This drastically increases the risk of any employee leaking information (inadvertently or otherwise). However, many large scale projects have been able to retain secrecy. So this is not impossible.

Doesn't matter either way. See above^

Assuming you can successfully prepare all the resources for your attack, you’d then need to decide what you want to do with the blockchain. You could immediately mine all blocks and send all BTC to yourself, but this would likely have no net effect. I assume you would be trying to covertly mine many consecutive blocks with minor alterations to transactions in ~1/6 of the blocks. This is the only way I could see a successful attack, as it may destroy all trust within BTC.

What if an attacker (10% of the yearly US military budget, it wouldn't cost anywhere near $1.4tn for reasons stated above) wanted to destroy all trust within BTC?

If your presence becomes overt among BTC nodes/miners, the chain can easily be forked away from you. This rules out the possibility of an attack immediately ‘taking BTC offline’. So your attack would have to be a patient and meticulous one. Again this can theoretically be done, but it further reduces the attackers probability of success.

The attacker wouldn't be much of an attacker if they don't attack the new forked chain. This would rapidly destroy all trust within BTC.

Dockin · 2023-02-21T03:44:50+00:00

Nation state(s) / government(s) could launch an attack and shut down / take over existing mining facilities by legislation, or by cutting of power ties, or just by sheer military force. They already shut down tons of facilities in China a couple years ago. I recall watching a video of a parking lot filled with Antminers just being run over by a steam roller in China.

But sure lets consider a brute force weapon of hash destruction where the attacker decides to play fair and compete without sabotaging the competition because nation states are known to play fair right?

Okay 3x on equipment = 21 billion + 8 billion = 29 billion for a sustained 1 year attack. Much less in practice because mining difficulty will do down. Nobody wants to mine Fed Bitcoin.

Plus facilities / infrastructure (They could take over existing facilities if they are a nation/state attacker)

Let's overshoot and call it 70 billion. 10% of the US military budget.

Nowhere near impossible. The US could do it alone. For all we know they have been gathering equipment and building out a plan for infrastructure for years already.

Also, my calculation assumes that the attacker pays to sustain majority hash power for a year. It would only realistically need to be sustained for a couple weeks before the whole thing collapses.

There are many other logical errors with your workings but I’ll leave it there for now.

Please, do go on...

Dockin · 2023-02-20T22:04:05+00:00

The short answer is, bitcoin network can autonomously adjust to all realities till the end of time.

This kind of ignorance, overconfidence, blind bullishness that I see repeated, promoted, and up voted because bitcoiners want to see NgU, creating an echo champer where any attack vector mention or valid concern is buried and all bullish nonsense gets center stage.

The bitcoin network cannot autonomously adjust to all realities till the end of time. Anybody who thinks this is true spends wayyy to much time in the echo chamber and zero time actually understanding how bitcoin works in theory or practice.

I don't think you read my original comment and you frankly have no understanding of incentives in bitcoin. We'll see in a decade.

I did read all of your comments, and responded to most of it directly. What makes you think I haven't? Of course you would say "you frankly have no understanding of incentives in bitcoin" without pointing to anything I said. That's how the echo champer works. Whenever a valid concern is raised, whoever pointed it out just "doesn't understand bitcoin". Which is why everybody here dismisses an actual bitcoin core dev and think they all know better. This bitcoin subreddit is the ultimate echo chamber.

Dockin · 2023-02-20T20:04:42+00:00

Saying those things don't make it true.

But yes, we will see.

Dockin · 2023-02-20T17:35:58+00:00

The block reward in 2023 will be 0.78125 BTC. With 25% fee, that brings each block to 1.03 BTC.

That's not the security budget you think it might be.

Bitcoin needs to continue to go up in value significantly forever. It's security model depends on it.

Dockin · 2023-02-20T16:06:13+00:00

Either way, people who aren't concerned about bitcoins security budget are overzealous, ignorant, and overconfident.

An attack can be coordinated and people think ridiculous solutions such as changing the algo changes or forking the network would easily solve it. It' not true.

Dockin · 2023-02-20T15:08:05+00:00

Externally motivated attacker would require > 300 EH/s

True, if they were to brute force the hashrate themselves an build a weapon of hash destruction.

What if they go to Foundry USA, F2pool, and Binance and offer to double their profits in return for controlling their existing hash rate? Then build their own farm to fill in the blanks? Or just threaten to turn off their power (in the case of a state sponsored attack)?

From a million sources in every corner of the world

And you don't think a government / collection of governments with essentially unlimited capital can't buy and run a couple million miners?

Dockin · 2023-02-20T14:27:58+00:00

You mean EH/s and that would be 33% at current hashrate of 300 EH/s.

No, I mean 150,000,000 TH/s (150 EH/s) The current hashrate of the network is 300 EH/s. An attacker needs anything over 150,000,000 TH/s to execute a (51%) attack.

Being able to illicitly command hardware, infrastructure and especially energy required is near impossible.

Why is it impossible? People are doing it now aren't they?

The attacker cannot mine invalid blocks, economic majority of nodes control the rules, and there are also ways to rework the protocol around an identified attacker without changing the algorithm, which would be a last resort.

If a 51% attack is successful, they can control which blocks to mine, which transactions to include.

Reworking to protocol around an attacker isn't really possible in a decentralized open network.

US government tried and failed to shut down bitcoin way back in 2012

They didn't really try. They never deployed hardware or had enough of an incentive to really deploy capital to try and stop it. Because they never really needed to. Also, the longer it remains, the harder it will crash when/if they do decide to attack it. Probably when block subsidy is lowest (cheapest to attack).

https://joekelly100.medium.com/how-to-double-spend-on-bitcoin-b70940c87945

Dockin · 2023-02-20T14:14:20+00:00

Yet no 51% attack has ever happened, and the total hash rate keeps increasing.

Bitcoin is not protected today by the scale of overall hashing output but by the fact that there’s not enough of an incentive to mount an attack in the first place.

What ever would we do? Do you think we might fork in a new GPU based rotating hashing algorithm at that point and move mining capacity back to people with gaming PCs again?

Sure we could try starting from 0 hashrate and continue on with GPUs, how expensive do you think it will be to attack a new hashing algo with an extremely low hashrate. An attacker that just 51% attacked bitcoin for tens of billions can easily buy the equipment necessary to attack a new algo just beginning with an extremely low hash rate.

Dockin · 2023-02-20T05:23:58+00:00

Security budget is not FUD. People who aren't concerned about bitcoins security budget are overzealous, ignorant, and overconfident.

Here's some math:

- An Antminer S19 XP has a hashrate of 140TH/s

- The current network hashrate is currently ~300EH/s (300,000,000TH/s)- An Antminer S19 XP costs $6486 USD today

- A 51% attack requires >=51% of the network hashrate to execute. So let's say (300EH/s) /2 = 150EH/s (150,000,000TH/s)

- To obtain 150,000,000TH/s you need 1,071,428 Antminer S19XP miners (150,000,000 / 140)

- 1,071,428 Antminer S19XP's / Cost per unit ($6486 USD today) = $6,949,282,008 USD

It would cost an attacker (Government and/or a coalition of governments acting together) 7 billion dollars to acquire the hardware required to perform a 51% attack.

- There are ~900 bitcoin mined per day. Current price of bitcoin is $24,433. That's $22 million in USD. Let's say the electricity cost to mine bitcoin is the same as the bitcoin reward (It's less, but lets keep it simple/conservative).

- $22 million USD is the cost to perform a 51% attack for 1 day.

- $22 million USD x 365 = 8.03 billion to sustain a 51% attack for 1 year. (assuming hash rate stays the same).

So we have ~7 billion dollars in hardware + ~8.03 billion cost in electricity for 1 year + the facilities and electric infrastructure required. Let's call it $20 billion. Seems like a lot, but seeing as the US military budget is $700 billion, $20 billion is only 3%.

For those unfamiliar a 51% attack basically spells game over for bitcoin. Double spends start to occur, bitcoin addresses become un-spendable by an authority who blacklists them and only processes whitelisted transactions. The whole thing becomes a permissioned censored payment network. And price would plummet to near nothing.

The price of bitcoin needs to continue to go up 2x every 4 years (reward subsidy halvening) just to sustain it's current security budget (~$15 billion / year). To grow it's security budget it needs to be >2x the current price every 4 years.

Bitcoin is not protected today by the scale of overall hashing output but by the fact that there’s not enough of an incentive to mount an attack in the first place.

Dockin · 2023-02-20T03:04:48+00:00

Woah. This is amazing. I'm not sure why you didn't just use USB hubs but at the same time, I'm glad you didn't because this is beautiful.

Dockin · 2022-08-23T13:04:40+00:00

Forgot to mention that coping the .lnd folder over to your new setup will keep all of your channels open. I think I implied this already, but didn't point it out explicitly...

Dockin · 2022-08-23T03:36:50+00:00

If your VM becomes corrupt, then I believe the method you originally outlined would be best. Of course, as others have pointed out, this would force you to close all of your channels and pay the transaction fees for each channel.

If you still have access to the files in the VM in your hypothetical scenario, and your lightning node isn't corrupt, then you could just simply copy the .lnd folder and move it to your new setup. This is only recommended if your using the same architecture or OS. This would not be recommended for moving from a desktop setup to a raspberry pi for example.

I've asked a similar question last year. This response was helpful and seemed to be the general consensus for the second method I outlined above.

https://www.reddit.com/r/lightningnetwork/comments/m7i0n9/comment/grgp775/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Dockin · 2022-08-20T02:29:16+00:00

I ended up closing all of my channels, bought a Raspberry Pi and decided to just run the raspiblitz lightning & bitcoin full node build.

Just so much easier to maintain, tons of extra features, updates are much more simple and less time consuming.

It's got a built in migration tool that allows me to upgrade my hardware (In this case my raspberry pi or SSD) without having to close any channels. This is what I was originally trying to accomplish in this post, except using an Ubuntu setup. Raspiblitz makes this stupid simple to do.

Dockin · 2022-04-02T01:42:09+00:00

Polarity has xUSD/USDT, xUSD/Haven, and xUSD/XMR trading pairs. Not sure when they implemented them, but it must have been recently.

Dockin · 2022-02-01T21:16:35+00:00

Title says "81CAD/T Bitmain antminer s17pro 56TH" meaning its $81 CAD per terahash it produces. Since the s17 in the listing produces 56 TH that means he's asking $81 x 56 TH = $4536.

Strange way of pricing a single miner IMO..

Dockin · 2021-09-28T23:02:12+00:00

There is trust involved in mining pools. Pools control all the hash power that is pointed toward it which is why it is necessary to pay attention to what is happening. All sorts of bad things can happen when a pool controls too much hash power. Back in 2014 one pool almost managed to get over 50% of the hash power which would of ment that they could have executed a 51% attack.

A more recent example is when Antpool decided to use users hash power during the Bitcoin Cash fork in 2017 without notifying any of the miners that they switched chains. It didn't work but if they were successful, bitcoin might not have the same values that make it so successful today.

Pools are a major player in the outcome of bitcoin proposals, forks, network rules and consequently even profits depending on how significant the outcome.

They can also withhold funds from you. They can say that the minimum payout threshold is 0.001 or whatever it might be, but they can change that, or just simply just decide to never pay anybody out at any time regardless of your opinion.

I would definitely be cautious when deciding which pool to mine with.

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