How long will it take till I can buy GPUs again?
The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]
#32Michael 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…
Using log charts is appropriate for data that spans multiple orders of magnitude. I don't know why you complain about distortion, unless you think the data itself is wrong?
The log chart is used to hide volatility.
Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]
#33Michael 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
To who?
This is an academic article, making that assumption would be negligent.
Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> it's basically two rounds of SHA-256.
There's a bit more to this; there's clever optimisations you can do (based on the Merkle–Damgård structure of SHA256 and the format/semantics of the data being hashed): http://www.mit.edu/~jlrubin/public/pdfs/Asicboost.pdf
Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using log charts is appropriate for data that spans multiple orders of magnitude. I don't know why you complain about distortion, unless you think the data itself is wrong?
The log chart is used to hide volatility.
I guess it depends on how you are used to eyeball volatility, but for relative swings (percentages) log charts are actually best, since constant differences in the chart correspond to constant percentages.
Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]
#36Nice 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 used in all of the mid to high end test equipment: things like signal generators, digital multimeters, spectrum analysers, osciloscopes and such.
Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]
#37How long will it take till I can buy GPUs again?
GPUs are no longer used for Bitcoin mining. The recent GPU shortage is caused by the raise of thousands of little altcoins. It's obviously unsustainable, and it's going to end in a big crash, and all these GPUs will flood the market. It's hard to predict when it's going to happen (I'm guessing this year), but if you're patient you will be able to buy GPUs very cheaply.
Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]
#38Nice 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?
We have been developing and selling FPGA based QAM modulators for DOCSIS and video for last 2 decades but currently all major companies are slowly moving from specialized hardware to software solutions with bare minimum of custom hardware. But some devices still retain FPGAs. All legacy devices sold in tens of thousands also may require support from FPGA expert. Multiple solutions use specialized Broadcom chips that are half way between ASIC and FPGA.
FPGAs are expensive by themselves, expensive to implement in your solution, very hot, relatively slow and require rare expertise from developers. But they have one feature that beats everything - they can be patched in production.
Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]
#39How long will it take till I can buy GPUs again?
GPUs are no longer used for Bitcoin mining. The recent GPU shortage is caused by the raise of thousands of little altcoins. It's obviously unsustainable, and it's going to end in a big crash, and all these GPUs will flood the market. It's hard to predict when it's going to happen (I'm guessing this year), but if you're patient you will be able to buy GPUs very cheaply.
I wouldn't consider Ethereum to be "a little altcoin". While there may be a correction in the market, I don't think it will be "bitcoin vs. everything else"; at this point it would probably be all cryptocurrencies, or something more specific (individual coins, or classes, but probably not "scrypt-based coins as a class")
Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]
#40Nice 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…
It's surprising how many places FPGA's show up. I picked up a used black magic pci capture card that had a xilinx on it. It's not a mass consumer product but I am guessing they still sell a good number of them.
People seem to forget that much of the allure with FPGA's is the 'Field programmable' part - where you can fix bugs and upgrade hardware after it's shipped.