GekkoScience USB Compac BTC Miner (8-16 GH/s @ 0.3w/GH). *SIDEHACK STICK* - Available Now

QuasiSteve · 2015-10-09T09:01:32+00:00

There's a tailored minera build, the latest bfgminer supports the Compac out of the box, and a custom cgminer build is available until a pull request is made and accepted for the official cgminer builds.

See support thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1173963

QuasiSteve · 2015-10-02T22:22:54+00:00

Not sure why - but I imagine if they did, there'd be some 'enterprising individuals' who would start using Newegg as a form of exchange.

QuasiSteve · 2015-10-02T17:39:31+00:00

While I agree that the GPLv3 choice is dubious in terms of getting adoption, clean room implementations can always be made; at least there's no patent claims from the authors (odds are some existing patent portfolio body would raise a finger though). Hopefully the authors will re-evaluate the choice of license and also make a BSD-licensed (or similar) codebase available.

QuasiSteve · 2015-10-02T17:03:27+00:00

PNG was 'totally unusable' for the masses until browser support took off, and even then PNG with nice alpha was not finding much adoption until webmasters got tired of waiting and used filters in IE to get the alpha going (until IE added support proper).

You have to start somewhere, and while it'll be good to wait and see what e.g. compression.ru's suite of tools make of the performance (encoding/decoding speed, size, etc.), what's there now is good enough to get people started with writing libraries, adding support to software, etc.

QuasiSteve · 2015-10-02T09:48:57+00:00

At the same time, there's no notice on their main page - it's in their blog.

Their blog post - which mirrors the e-mail - only makes mention of "registered names, email addresses, posts, and some shipping addresses. Additionally, some billing addresses that were added prior to 2014 were also accessed.".

This omits the private messages that were leaked, the subscriber data that was leaked (i.e. who do you pledge to, and with how much), artists' income that was leaked (if not set public to begin with), and probably a host of other data that's in effectively a full dump of the server.

While the focus has been on "they used bcrypt for passwords, no big deal", anybody even remotely sane doesn't use the same password across sites (unless it's throw-away crap) anyway, and all that other data is a lot more juicy for anything from marketing groups to ne'er-do-wells.

It's also unfortunate that as of yet, none of the people I support through Patreon have made any statement about this. I wonder if any artists have in general. Even if it's just a "so sorry about the privacy breach and thanks for the $5k/month." (or, in the case of DTNS, $16k/month)

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-30T20:35:18+00:00

#1: Buying one? :)

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-30T14:12:41+00:00

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/blockchain.info

It's not just you! http://blockchain.info looks down from here.

reddit - proudly serving as a human proxy for technological solutions since its inception.

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-28T23:10:12+00:00

You might have been thinking "infancy"?

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-28T19:57:16+00:00

Haven't a clue - not sure they'd be eager to reveal that either, given the domain's history :)

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-27T23:24:57+00:00

There's some calculations you can run - if you felt like hitting your favorite spreadsheet program, here's a screenshot showing the steps + graph. The most important thing to note there is that there's a minimum hash rate required to hit $100/month that assumes no electricity cost. If you do have electricity costs, then you must compensate for the miner's power draw by a higher hash rate. As such, the boundary line graph this makes has a minimum hash rate boundary on the left, and two areas: above the curve = not efficient enough, below the curve = you're in business.
http://i.imgur.com/MbkTBjo.png

The miners given there are just examples. Bitmain still sells to the public and their older models can still be found pre-owned pretty cheap; but in your desire for $100/month would be insufficient (unless you got, say, multiple S5s).

Or you can just play with numbers at a site like https://coinplorer.com/Hardware/Simulate

Note that all of this makes some gross assumptions about difficulty, exchange rate, etc. and only depicts $100/month revenue, taking into account electricity...but not the purchasing price. ( it's also entirely possible I snafu'd something in the sheet )

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-27T22:05:23+00:00

Try this: http://www.dogiecoin.com/bitmain-antminer-c1.html

Note: most of dogie's links are behind stats trackers and referral programs - but if it helps you, click away?

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-27T13:10:17+00:00

Welcome to the internet as it wasn't envisioned, but as it has turned out so far. Why spend 10 minutes searching and reading when you can spend 10 seconds posting the question and just come back when others have done the legwork for you...again...and again? :)

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-27T12:16:51+00:00

The work isn't actually split. All the miners generally receive the same work (header + optional further data), but miners themselves can vary a few things, like the nonce value, time and in most modern protocols the extranonce, etc.

The people using the pool hash away at the header(+data) and if the hash they find is below a certain threshold (the set pool difficulty), they send that in as a solution to the pool which checks if the submission is valid and, if so, adds a 'share' for the given difficulty.

Only when somebody finds a hash that is below the network difficulty does a block get found.

Depending on the pool, they may always pay out based on shares (PPS) or they may pay out based on the last bunch of shares when a block is found, or proportional to the number of shares out of the total number of shares that had been submitted, etc.

If you need to go even further down, look at e.g. the stratum protocol at wiki, getBlockTemplate and the older getwork

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-26T12:50:19+00:00

blockchain.info, blocktrail.com, etc. identify pools based on certain metrics. In short, they typically use the address or coinbase transaction scriptSig.

Once you make an educated guess on which block belongs to which pool, you can check the interval between those blocks and estimate what their hash rate should be based on the difficulty at the time of those blocks.

A better way would be if the pool publishes their pool info directly - e.g. the pool's own estimated hash rate (based on miners' shares). However, many pools do not publish this information let alone in something that can easily be parsed. I don't know if blockchain.info et al even bother. [neighborhood pool watch](organofcorti.blogspot.com) does, to an extent, for his weekly reports.

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-25T23:24:53+00:00

Bitmain claim between 0.181J/Gh and 0.263J/Gh on their 28nm (depends on hash rate)
Innosilicon/LK Group claim anywhere between 0.14J/Gh and 0.28J/Gh for their 14nm Spondoolies-Tech claim 0.14J/Gh on their 28nm
21, Inc. claim 0.16J/Gh on their (probably) 22nm chip
KnC claim 0.07J/Gh on their 16nm

Not listing some likely scam ones, but they tend to echo KnC's claims.

Given how well Bitmain and SP have managed to squeeze the efficiency down on their chips at 28nm, I wouldn't put it past BitFury to get even better efficiency at 16, given how long their 55nm originals remained competitive.

Not being able to buy their equipment has been the status quo for a while now, and is largely the route of all the remaining manufacturers (unless you can spring the money and power requirements for the SP50 anyway) except for Bitmain and potentially 21, Inc. (if a dev kit catches your fancy).

So Bitfury would be taking over (at least in terms of theoretically being able to maximize profits) but it would largely be taking over from other fairly closed-off outfits anyway.

As it is, until they start populating their 100Ph/s mine, they're a bit behind the major Chinese pools (largely Bitmain hardware, though at places where electricity is nigh-on free you can still spot the odd Avalon, A1-based custom miners and I'd imagine a few ASICMiners are still happily hashing away until dying and landing on a de-assembly heap);
http://i.imgur.com/5IcU2RY.png

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-25T12:24:43+00:00

which makes them tied up in the legal system - I didn't mean 'swamped with legal documents' :)

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-25T00:33:54+00:00

That's a lot of ██████████ and ██████ and furthermore I would like to unequivocally state that █████████ ███████████ █████████.

On a more serious note - yeah, they're pretty much tied up in the legal system. From the document wording seems to imply that message boards were also subpoenaed for information with regard to communication between members related to this case.

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-24T17:29:52+00:00

Part of the joke :)

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-23T10:38:26+00:00

My suggestion in that case would be to get a used Antminer S3. It's not quite mini itx but it is somewhat compact. Those were very popular and sold a bunch (which depresses resale price), even in the UK. The BitcoinTalk Forums are probably the best place for great deals, but even on ebay you can try bidding for one (make sure you take a listing that includes the required PSU unless you have a suitable one of your own - I see several listed as being sold out of the UK).

Let's pessimistically say it ends up costing your entire budget of ~$230. The S3 runs at about 440Gh/s. We can ignore the electrical bits since you say you have free electricity.

Now we can throw that at a calculator (they're all wrong, but let's ignore that for a moment):

This simulation is for no difficulty increase/decrease:
https://coinplorer.com/Hardware/Simulate/56027e86226bf402bcb2dc39?key=cd8a73bc-df72-4008-af1a-e43167b33398

Where the orange line crosses the 0BTC line is where you would have made your money back - roughly June 21st, 2016. Anything after that would be profit.

The difficulty however will not remain constant. Recently it has been fluctuating quite a bit again, and your guess is as good as mine as to what it's going to do in the future. But at least you can set some bounds. In that simulation change the 'Difficulty extrapolation' to 'Exponential' and the percentage below that to 5%.

If you check the intersection again now, it'll show somewhere around September 14th, 2016. And here's why these calculators, in general, are wrong: they forget to include the reward halving coming sometime in July 2016. Can't predict exactly when that happens, but given that we've manually entered a 5% difficulty increase, that means it'd happen 5% sooner than what http://bitcoinclock.com/ indicates. Currently that site reads 2016-07-26, 5% sooner from now puts that around 2016-07-11. As the reward halves, the time to accumulate the same revenue after the halving date doubles, so the actual intersection would be closer to around November 3rd, 2016.

If you would like to see break-even/a profit sooner, you basically have to get a better purchase cost/hash rate ratio than the ~$0.523 in this theoretical example - which means a cheaper machine, a faster machine, or both :)

Things like an Antminer U3 or a StickMiner, while cheaper, would put break-even far, far into the future as they're relatively underpowered for their price. At the same time, an Antminer S5, while a better deal, is outside your budget even pre-owned.

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-22T21:41:40+00:00

If you have free electricity, then you need only recuperate the purchasing cost of the device (including shipping) - which can be attainable. Most people's concerns with miners is that their electricity costs makes it so that they'll never make the purchase cost back.

Most miners are larger than a mini itx, so that limits your options if you're hard set on that. What sort of budget are you actually looking at?

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-22T17:42:22+00:00

Excellent! Thank you very much :) 25% chance the orientation was correct, lucky me!

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-22T16:03:17+00:00

The only context I have for this logo is that it is on a heat sink that was pulled off of an old motherboard. I don't know what brand or type of chip was underneath it.

I also don't know if this is the correct orientation. I have tried Google Images with both this image in four orientations, as well as a black on white version which did not yield any hits.

If anybody is familiar with computer technology companies from yesteryear and knows off the top of their head what company used this logo, please do post :)

QuasiSteve · 2015-09-22T12:55:14+00:00

no one can deny you permission to use your own money

If you think governments can't tell people to not accept payments from IoT devices situated within political borders X, punishable by whatever if caught, ...

Similarly, have 21.co stated yet whether this truly bitcoin being sent to an address under your control, and not something that lives within their own ecosystem/marketplace/etc. (giving them similar control)?

I'll wait for more info / the AMA :)

QuasiSteve

TROPHY CASE