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The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

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Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#11
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely 0 innovation in creating new hardware for Bitcoin mining: the only thing that stop us from having it is the economies of scale. Please stop mistaking one for another.

I think bias is making you more unfair than you need to be.

You could support that by pointing out what you feel the actual innovations involved in Bitcoin hardware are.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#13
post #9

Nice history of money printing machines. Very nice and very easy FPGA application back then, just 2 sha256 pipes. Is there something worth pursuing nowadays for FPGAs? Machine learning?

FPGAs are worth it for anything that's too fast for software and is too niche for an ASIC. In my experience they are very popular for "pro tools" which are too specialized and don't have a large enough volume to justify creating an ASIC and are so expensive that the price of the BoM is not really a concern. For instance I work on products that do a lot of video processing on FPGAs (way too high bandwidth for software, too specialized for an ASIC).

Now if you look at consumer electronics you obviously won't find many FPGAs. Too expensive, too power hungry, too costly and at large scales ASICs are a better match.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely 0 innovation in creating new hardware for Bitcoin mining: the only thing that stop us from having it is the economies of scale. Please stop mistaking one for another.

I think bias is making you more unfair than you need to be.

I think he's being fair. The real difficulty in making an ASIC is justifying the huge price to start production. The good old "the first chip is worth $10 millions, the second is worth $5" or something like that.

Designing a bitcoin mining IP is not exactly difficult, it's basically two rounds of SHA-256. It's still some work of course, but as far as ASICs are concerned it's very low on the difficulty scale.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think bias is making you more unfair than you need to be.

You could support that by pointing out what you feel the actual innovations involved in Bitcoin hardware are.

Faith routing, amongst those who are underserved or disenchanted with incumbent faith routing providers.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#16
post #13
post #9

Nice history of money printing machines. Very nice and very easy FPGA application back then, just 2 sha256 pipes. Is there something worth pursuing nowadays for FPGAs? Machine learning?

FPGAs are worth it for anything that's too fast for software and is too niche for an ASIC. In my experience they are very popular for "pro tools" which are too specialized and don't have a large enough volume to justify creating an ASIC and are so expensive that the price of the BoM is not really a concern. For instance I work on products that do a lot of video processing on FPGAs (way too high bandwidth for software…

Bernie Meyers of IBM once told me that he believed FPGA would be the future of Moore's law. he felt strongly that they provided a performance and flexibility tradeoff that made them ideal for using in virtually all servers as coprocessors for certain functions. The fact that the FPGA code can be audited was a plus as well.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could support that by pointing out what you feel the actual innovations involved in Bitcoin hardware are.

Faith routing, amongst those who are underserved or disenchanted with incumbent faith routing providers.

Could you elaborate on that? I've never heard the term and Googling isn't being helpful.

https://www.google.com/search?q="faith+routing"+bitcoin

https://www.google.com/search?q="faith+routing"+cryptocurren...

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#18
post #9

Nice history of money printing machines. Very nice and very easy FPGA application back then, just 2 sha256 pipes. Is there something worth pursuing nowadays for FPGAs? Machine learning?

High Frequency Trading. They have been on the rise for last couple of years.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#20
post #2

Michael Bedford Taylor misrepresents the most important aspect of these "ASIC clouds" and the bitcoin algorithm; the puzzle of the algorithm is incredibly simple. Every implementation of a Bitcoin miner simply generates a bunch of random guesses to the hash equation. On page 60, graph (a) Professor Taylor uses distorted manipulative log charts for finance. The chart on page 61 is the most insanely manipulative chart…

The built-in increase of difficulty proportional to new blocks is well known
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