MineForeman.com

How to protect your bitcoin in a hard fork

2017-11-02T20:30:00+13:00

I have had a few questions about protecting bitcoin in a hard fork from friends and colleagues recently. I have also read people asking this question in various bitcoin forums throughout the internet and while I have seen a lot of good advice out there, I have also seen some terrible advice.

Protecting your bitcoin has come to a head recently with a new bitcoin fork about to happen at block 494,784. I will try to spare you my opinion as to what fork is ‘right or wrong’ or any of the politics involved, I will just tell you how to protect your bitcoin by splitting them, as safely as possible, if that is what you chose to do.

I mostly want to help you understand how and why this method of spiting works so you can make the best-informed decision you can. My hope is that if you have already decided to split your coins I can point you to a method that is (relatively) safe and easy to follow so you don't end up being forked.

For the two blockchains I am talking about I will use the semi-neutral labels that have been assigned to them by others, they are:

S1X - The un-forked chain (S1X full client download)
S2X - The chain doing the forking (S2X full client download)

I have tried to make the process as generic as possible. There are so many wallets, exchanges, block explorers, hot wallets, cold wallets, hardware wallets, paper wallets and permutations of them there is no possible way I can cover them all. The important thing is that you understand how it is done and the steps involved so you can apply it to your own situation.

What's Happening

Within the next few weeks at block 494,784 bitcoin will probably split in two in what we call a hard fork. The exact time and date are a bit hard to estimate with blocks times fluctuating as they do but there is a countdown clock available if you want to keep an eye on it.

The essence of the hard fork is that there will be the S1X chain that follows the current rules and the S2X chain that has an altered rule that allows the transaction space to be twice as large as it was before going from 1 MB to 2 MB.

While the S2X forks rules will be compatible with S1X rules, the unchanged rules in the S1X blockchain will reject any block that uses in excess of 1 MB purely for transactions in the S2X fork. I am careful to say ‘purely for transactions’ because either chain can contain up to an additional 3 times their original capacity by storing the transactions in a slightly different format.

Why would you split your coins

Because there is currently no replay protection, if you don’t split your coins it is quite possible that the next time you transfer your coins to a third party on one blockchain you may inadvertently transfer the coins on the other blockchain. This is often called a transaction replay or a replay attack. It removes the opportunity for you to choose what you do with your coins because you don't own them anymore.

There is also an opportunity, if you have a strong preference for either side of the upcoming hard fork you can sell the coins you don’t want and buy the coins you do.

As an example, in the recent Bitcoin Cash fork on the 1st of August those users that split their coins early and decided to support Bitcoin Cash managed to receive 5 times the amount of Bitcoin they sold as Bitcoin Cash. Those that sold Bitcoin Cash managed to gain an extra 20% Bitcoin. There is no guarantee you will actually get those rates or what the value of that 5x or 20% will be so choose carefully if you decide to go down that route.

What side of the fork to chose

I am not going to tell you because if it did it would just be my opinion. If you are reading this you have probably formed an opinion of your own and I would suggest that you follow your own counsel and do what you are comfortable with.

I need to point out that splitting your coins and then doing nothing with them is also a valid option. Choosing to do nothing and preventing others from choosing for you gives you time to decide exactly what you want to do.

The Risks of Hard Forks

Unfortunately, in a hard fork, there is a real risk in unintentionally losing either side of your forked coins or in more extreme circumstances both.

The primary risk in losing your coins on one side of the fork is by transferring the other side of the fork to a third party. It is likely that the transaction you make will be replaced (i.e. submitted) to the other side of the fork transferring the coins on the other chain as well. If that happens, unless you can convince the third party to transfer them back, you have lost them.

Additionally, some of the other methods to split coins (I will list some at the end) either require technical abilities that not everyone has or excessive counterparty risk that may, if things go wrong, leave you with no coins on either chain.

Finally, protecting bitcoin in a hard fork requires you to make a few bitcoin transactions. Make sure you are comfortable moving your bitcoin.

Replay Protection

Now the doom and gloom part is over I have to point out that all these risks may never eventuate. It is quite possible that the S2X hard fork will include something called replay protection.

Replay protection makes it so that a transaction on one blockchain is incompatible with transactions on the other blockchain so your transaction cannot be replayed. There are many ways to implement replay protection, some are mandatory, some are optional.

Since the S2X fork has yet to implement replay protection [1] I can't comment on how it may work if implemented at all. Regardless, the below spitting method only involves a small amount of risk that can be quickly mitigated if replay protection is implemented.

Since you cannot implement replay protection without forking the S1X blockchain is unable to protect your transactions from replays.

When Bitcoin Cash forked it implemented strong replay protection and that is why users were able to safely make the choice as to what to do with their coins on either blockchain.

The Method

Now I have covered the bases as to why you would want to split your coins and what the potential risks may be here are the simplified steps to split your coins:

Pre-Fork

Make absolutely sure you have read and understood what you are about to do.
Open your S1X wallet and make sure you are familiar with how it works.
Find an exchange that will support both sides of the fork.
Transfer a tiny amount of bitcoin to the exchange.
Move/Consolidate all of your bitcoin into a single address in your wallet.

You can do all of the above now if you wish.

Fairly much any wallet that lets you transact in Bitcoin today should work as long as it allows you to consolidate all of your bitcoin into a single address in step 5. There are wallets that won't let you transfer all of your bitcoin into a single address [2]. If that is the case you will need to move all your bitcoin to another wallet in order to consolidate all of your bitcoin into a single address.

As for what exchange to use, I believe both Bitfinex and HitBTC have plans to offer both. Unfortunately I do not keep all that up to date with exchanges (primarily because I am an awful trader but also because the last exchange I used extensively was MtGOX, I lost 0.00001227 bitcoin there!) so make sure you do your due diligence on your choice and definitely don't just take my word for it.

The part that involves risk is the small amount of bitcoin that you are storing on an exchange. I cannot recommend anyone keep bitcoin on an exchange that they cannot afford to lose so please, keep this amount to the minimum, there only needs to be enough to make sure you can transfer it off again and no more. Check the minimum withdrawal amount on your chosen exchange for a guide and remember to add any fees that they charge for withdrawals.

You are now setup to split your coins.

Post-Fork

Make absolutely sure you have read and understood what you are about to do.
Make sure that the fork has happened.
Wait until your exchange allows you to withdraw the S1X coins.
Transfer the S1X coins into the address that you consolidated your coins into in step 5 above.
Wait until the transfer is confirmed.
Check that the coins are indeed split.
Make a transaction using your S1X wallet using ALL of your coins to another address in your wallet and wait for it to confirm.

It is important to note, even though the split will happen at block 494,784 it does not necessarily mean that the fork will happen at that block. It is quite possible that the S2X will not fork until a block with 1 MB+ pure transaction space in it is mined on it that will be rejected by the S1X chain. Fortunately using this method you won't have to worry about that because when your exchange allows you to transfer you can be fairly sure that the chain has been split.

It is also important to note that even once the chains have forked it may be a day or more before your exchange lets you transfer them as the exchange will need time to split their coins doing most of the work for you.

You can check that the coins are actually split after doing step 12 above with your S1X wallet by visiting the address on a block explorer that follows the S2X blockchain. What you are expecting to see is that the transaction is not on the S2X blockchain but confirmed in your S1X wallet. You should also see that the S2X coins are still in the address that you consolidated them into in step 5.

You are done, your coins are now split and are fully back under your control to do with what you will. Now is probably a good time to reclaim the S2X coins that will still be on the exchange into an S2X wallet along with your conciliated S2X coins.

Why this works

What we are doing here is getting an exchange to split a small amount of coins for you and then using those split coins to taint and split the rest of your coins.

The exchange will have their technical people working hard to make sure that they get the split using one (or most probably all) of the methods at the end of this article so you can be fairly sure that when you are able to withdraw from the exchange you will be only withdrawing from one side of the fork (the S1X side).

It means that when you do the final transaction in step 12 you are moving your consolidated S1X coins along with the tainted coins from the exchange. Because those tainted coins only exist on the S1X chain if it were replayed onto the S2X chain it will fail because those tainted coins don't exist on that chain. Conversely after step 12 when you transact with those consolidated coins on the S2X chain it cannot be replayed on the S1X chain because you have already moved the coins on the S1X chain.

The Result

You can now use your coins on both blockchains without the worry of it being replayed onto the other blockchain. There is literally no way to ever merge them again even if you wanted to (and I cannot see a single reason why you would want to).

Congratulations, you are now in control of your coins to do whatever you choose with them.

Final Notes

The primary risk of the above method it that it requires you to leave a tiny fraction of your bitcoin on an exchange. Exchanges get hacked, pull exit scams and sometimes they are even shut down by governments.
There is also the outside chance that the exchange will not split the coins correctly. Checking the blockchains in block explorers will mitigate that for you though.
There are also ways to shortcut some of the steps above. If you understand what you are doing feel free to modify the steps but realise, I cannot guarantee you have fully understood the steps so any modification you make to them is out of my control.
Securing your wallet from viruses, keyloggers and general internet nasties is as important as ever. If someone manages to steal from your wallet while you are splitting your coins all this effort is in vain.
The above method splits all your coins at once, if you are a bit wary of pooling all your bitcoin together like that you can actually do it a bit at a time by tainting your coins with coins you have already tainted. Be careful to make sure you keep track of your coins if you do it that way.
If you are unsure and don't understand something don't just take my word for it. Ask a friend or colleague who knows more than you do to help and advise you, ask your local bitcoin user group or even put out a question on reddit.
Finally, I cannot guaranty anything! Properly executed the above steps will work but things change and people make mistakes. As always in bitcoin, ultimately you are responsible for your bitcoin.

Alternate Methods

There are other ways to split your coins, I will list the main ones here (without links) so you can research them if you want. It is how the exchanges will be splitting their coins and with enough technical know how you could do it as well.

Tainting you coins with the help of a friendly miner.
N-Locktime splitting.
Replace By Fee & double spend splitting.
Leaving all of your coins on an exchange.

If you chose to use one of the above methods please make sure you understand what you are getting yourself into. Using the alternate methods will probably be quicker but most of them will be a lot more complex and the chance of error will be higher unless you know what you are doing. The option of leaving all of your coins on an exchange may seem the quickest of them all but also involves a huge amount of third-party risk and you probably won't be able to transfer your coins at all for at least a few days.

Footnotes

[1]	Not strictly true, they did temporarily implement an optional replay protection but it was later reversed because flaws were discovered.

[2]	I know bread for IOS as an example won't let you transfer to an address already in your wallet.

Dissecting Bitcoin Block 420,000

2016-07-10T11:22:00+12:00

A few years back after the last halving I wrote an article shortly after the first halving block 210,000 was mined dropping the subsidy from 50 BTC to 25 BTC. Since block 420,000 was just mined reducing the subsidy from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC I thought it would be an appropriate time to write a follow-up article with similar data for the most recent halving block comparing it to the previous one.

Last Time

For those that don't want to click to the older article here are the 'guts' of it;-

The Hash was 000000000000048b95347e83192f69cf0366076336c639f9b7228e9ba171342e.
The Merkle root was 3cdd40a60823b1c7356d0987078e9426724c5b3ab439c2d80ad2bdd620e603d8.
The Nonce was 4069828196.
The Difficulty was 3,438,908.96.
There are 10,500,025 bitcoins in circulation ($127,784,087.25 USD).
There are 1,050,002,500,000,000 satoshis (individual bitcoin units).
The block was solved in 23 minutes and 2 seconds.
A single high-end CPU (Intel Core i7 3930k) would have had a 50% chance to have solved the block in just over 7 years.
There were 457 individual transactions contained in the block.
The Mt.Gox average trade price for 1 BTC was $12.17 USD at the time.
There were 25,421.70093021 BTC worth of transactions in the block ($313,000 USD).
The Reward was 25 BTC ($300 USD).
The transaction fees, also collected by the mining pool were 13.56295554 BTC ($160 USD).
The 25 BTC were deposited into the address 1NEU779yvLaFk39k4Q3QdLjwpWTdWCbzqL.

[Warning: The SSL certificate for MtGOX doesen't appair to be valid... Wonder why?]

This Time

This time around I am going to tabulate the data so you can compare the blocks side by side so you can easily see what has changed;-

	2012	2016	Differance
Block Number	210,000	420,000	+210,000
Block Timestamp	2012-11-28 15:24:38	2016-07-09 16:46:13	3 years, 7 months, 11 days, 1 hour, 21 min, 35 sec
Found By	Laughingbear @ Slush's pool	zzhhzz @ F2Pool	N/A
Raw Block	210000.txt	420000.txt	N/A
Difficulty	3,438,908.96	213,398,925,331.3239	+213,395,486,422
Block Subsidy	25 BTC ($304.25 USD)	12.5 BTC ($8,125 USD)	-12.5 BTC (+$7,820.75 USD)
Bitcoins in Existence	10,500,025	15,750,012.5	+5,249,987.5
Block Size	199.127 KB	999.838 KB	+800.711 KB
Transations	457	1,257	+800
Transation Value	25,421.70093021 BTC ($313,000 USD)	16,628.95928636 BTC ($10,808,823 USD)	-8,792.74164385 BTC (+$10,495,823 USD)
Fees	13.56295554 BTC ($165 USD)	0.57569681 BTC ($374 USD)	-12.98725873 BTC (+$209 USD)
Exchange Rate	~$12.17 USD	~$650 USD	+$637.83 USD
Market Cap	$127,784,087.25 USD	$10,237,508,125 USD	+$10,109,724,037.80 USD
Network Hashrate	24,616 GH/s	1,553,893,736 GH/s	+1,553,869,120 GH/s
Coinbase Address	1NEU779yvLa.....	1KFHE7w8Bha.....	N/A

Conclusion

So, unsurprisingly, in every single factor bitcoin has grown [1] in orders of magnitudes (in some cases many orders of magnitude). Apart from that and being useful for future trivial pursuit questions there is not a lot of other conclusions to draw.

See you at the next halving in another ~4 years.

[1]	In a few metrics the BTC value has decreased but the USD exchange rate more than makes up for it.

Bitcoin Halving, what, why and what happened last time.

2016-07-04T10:20:00+12:00

CAmount GetBlockSubsidy(int nHeight, const Consensus::Params& consensusParams)
{
    int halvings = nHeight / consensusParams.nSubsidyHalvingInterval;
    // Force block reward to zero when right shift is undefined.
    if (halvings >= 64)
        return 0;

    CAmount nSubsidy = 50 * COIN;
    // Subsidy is cut in half every 210,000 blocks which will occur approximately every 4 years.
    nSubsidy >>= halvings;
    return nSubsidy;
}

Simple right?

In just a few days we will have the second bitcoin halving event. Often in bitcoin we forget that not everyone is elbow deep in code all day, not everyone has been 'with us' for years and while we may talk about things like 'The Halving' we probably don't do the best job at explaining exactly what it is, why it is, what happened last time and what might happen this time.

What is it?

For completeness, I will add the following line of code to the ones above;-

consensus.nSubsidyHalvingInterval = 210000;

What this code does is get the block subsidy (in bitcoins). The subsidy started out at 50 BTC (50 * COIN, where the coin is 100,000,000 satoshis) and halves that amount every 210,000 blocks (the consensus.nSubsidyHalvingInterval bit).

This subsidy is claimed by the miners of that particular block (plus a small amount of transaction fees) as payment for their work securing the bitcoin network. They use it to pay their bills (mostly electricity and updating hardware) and what is left over is their profit.

Since every block takes somewhere about 10 minutes because of the Poisson Process it works out to take approximately [1] 4 years for those 210,000 blocks to be generated, after which, the block subsidy halves. In reality, because the total hash rate has been increasing so quickly since Satoshi mined block 0 as more and more miners have come online with better and even more specialised hardware the blocks have been found in less than 10 minutes on average but for the purpose of this article, we are just going to call them 10-minute blocks and 4 years between halvings.

So, the subsidy started at 50 BTC on January 3rd, 2009, dropping to 25 BTC on November 28th, 2012 and it is about to drop to 12.5 BTC in a few days. The intention is that as the subsidy decreases the fees will take over paying the miners to secure the network.

This pattern will continue from now until the 64th halving (if (halvings >= 64) return 0;) but in practical terms it means that by 2140 there will be no block subsidy at all and the subsidy will (probably [2] ) be totally trivial well before that. Miners will, well before 2140, be relying totally on transaction fees (and that time is coming soon) in order to pay the bills and secure the bitcoin network.

Below is a table that lays it out from the beginning until 2024 so you can get a feel for the progression.

Block	Year (Approx)	BTC/block	Start BTC	BTC Added	End BTC	BTC Increase	End BTC % of Limit
0	2009	50	0	10,500,000	10,500,000	infinite	50%
210000	2012	25	10,500,000	5,250,000	15,750,000	50%	75%
420000	2016	12.5	15,750,000	2,625,000	18,375,000	16.67%	87.5%
630000	2020	6.25	18,375,000	1,312,500	19,687,500	7.142857%	93.75%
840000	2024	3.125	19,687,500	656,250	20,343,750	3.33333333%	96.875%

Rough numbers only, 2016 where we are now in bold. Check out the bitcoin wiki for the full progression.

Why do we do it?

Right, now the semi-technical stuff is out of the way the obvious question is why do we do this?

The answer is a bit philosophical (sorry) but it is one of the core tenants of bitcoin, controlled supply.

Unlike the fiat currency's that we are all used to (USD, GBP, Euro, NZD etc.) we know exactly how many bitcoins will ever be in existence 20,999,999.9769 [3] . We also know exactly how many have been minted at any particular point in time.

This is not actually a new concept, proponents of the Austrian School of Economic Thought have been suggesting such a monetary system since the late 19th century. It separates money from the state similar to how the church was separated from the state in many countries over the past few centuries.

It puts the value (or price if you like) directly into the hands of supply and demand and takes it away from any form of governance. No matter how much any authority wants they cannot print more, artificially fix or adjust supply in any way in order to manipulate their own (and others) economies.

Supply and demand are kings in bitcoin and since supply is fixed, demand is the only variable and the only way the price of bitcoin is discovered.

Because bitcoin cannot be destroyed [3] but can be lost (please backup your wallets now) this also makes bitcoin a deflationary currency and that is a stark point of difference as to what we have now with our traditional fiat currencies. Not everyone agrees that a deflationary currency is a good thing, in fact, most traditional economists subscribe to Keynesian Economics and they most definitely don't see it as a good thing.

Satoshi never explained why he chose 21 million as the upper limit nor did he explain why he chose 4 years for each halving (at least not when I was around or have found later apart from some vague references to gold mines). Like a lot of numbers in bitcoin they appear to be just arbitrary, perhaps they have some deeper meaning to him but in reality, the numbers are unimportant, what is important is that they exist and the effect (controlled supply in a predictable manner) that they have.

What happened last time?

Not a lot.

I wrote a few articles at the time. The block was found on slush's pool by a relatively new user called Laughingbear using a GPU in a standard PC that he normally used to play games.

Bitcoin was going for USD $12.17 (at MtGOX) and there was a whopping 13.56295554 BTC of fees [4] in the block (USD $165). The entire block reward was 38.56295554 BTC, at the going rate of the time that was just short of USD $470 (Oh, how things have changed). It was almost a year before we had any serious price movement and it did not seem related to the halving at all.

The entire bitcoin market cap was just under USD $128 million compared to just over USD $10 billion today.

Speculation with the mainstream media (and more than a few bitcoiners) was that bitcoin would be over, after all, how could mining continue at such a low return?

The difficulty did a little dip before the halving but continued to grow, we knew at the time that the next generation cheaper and more efficient miners (ASIC's) were about to become generally available but we were still mining mostly with GPS's and FPGA's. If you had more than a few gigs of mining power you were considered a serious miner.

All and all, it was a bit of a non-event.

What will happen this time?

Who knows? I would caution you to treat anyone who tells you that they do with scepticism.

There are a few things to take into account though;-

Unlike last time there are no 'next generation' miners hitting the market. Last time we were making the transition from GPU/FPGA to dedicated ASIC's and while there are more efficiencies to be made to today's hardware it is nothing like the increases that were made from the transition to ACIC's 4 years ago.
Mining has scaled up so it is no longer a hobby that can be run to make a few coins.
Mining farms now are serious investments with serious ongoing costs.
The margin in mining is quite slim, there is/was no way to 'build in' the cost of the upcoming halving into your costs, certainly no way near the ~50% hit miners are about to take.
At the current bitcoin price the current hash rate is unsustainable.

Bitcoin has always and will always be venturing into uncharted waters. What comes next is far from certain and looking to the past at what happened last time, for this halving at least, does not help much past telling us that we don't actually know what the future holds.

Footnotes

[1]	210,000 blocks * 10 minutes / (525,600 minutes in a standard year - 1440 for a leap day) = 4.00641025641 years. It is 'close enough' to 4 years.

[2]	Who knows what a satoshi will be worth decades from now. There is also the chance that we may extend bitcoin beyond 8 decimal places.

[3]	(1, 2) Technically not true, there can be less. For example In Block 124724, a miner mined a solo block which underpaid the subsidy by a single Satoshi.

[4]	13.56295554 BTC in fees was not normal for the time by the way, a lot of people paid larger than normal fees to get a transaction into that block.

Physics and economics will [ensure] distributed mining... I'm not worried

2014-12-04T12:54:00+13:00

Every now and then I read something that I think is inspired. In this instance I came across a reddit post by someone going by the handle of foolish_austrian.

His expertise and unique look on where bitcoin mining may be in the long term really captured my imagination and I thought readers may enjoy his far off vision of where mining may lead is in the future. So, without any more from me, here is the [not so]foolish_austrian;-

"As someone who comes from a physics and engineering background, over the long run I'm not concerned with mining centralization. Physics will ensure it is distributed.

To qualify, I think there will be strong ebbs and flows while we catch up to Moore's law. During the next few years, hardware is simply going to depreciate too quickly.

Around the year 2024, we are expected to hit the quantum mechanical limit, which broadly speaking means we will have perfected the silicon transistor to the atomic level. If we make them any smaller, they become transparent to matter. (Incidentally, I work on replacements for transistors that use the angular momentum of electrons to store data).

As we approach this limit, mining hardware is going to depreciate over years, not months. When this happens, the dynamics of mining investment will substantially change. Mining in Greenland with cheap energy and cool climate will actually be more expensive than decentralization. Actually, the profit from mining will go negative, Greenland mining will become impossible in it's current form.

What mining does is convert electricity to heat, but not just any heat... specifically something between 90C to 120C, or heat around the boiling point of water. This heat density is too low for most industrial uses, except possibly things like water purification. It cannot be used for smelting, semiconductor processes, or anything that requires very high heat density without a heat pump.

As a result, what do you do with the enormous capacity to produce \~100C heat? For discussion sake, I'm going to address residential and industrial water heaters, although you could imagine other similar distributed use cases for small amounts of heat.

I just ran over to Sears website and checked the EnergyStar rating on water heaters, and found the average to be about \$300/year. According to the US census there are approximately 115 million households in the United States. This means there is about a 34.5 Billion dollar market for electricity to heat conversion. Since 100C (semiconductor temperatures) is just about right to heat water to 55C, this is an absolutely natural market for bitcoin mining.

One could vaguely argue that with limited industrial uses and expanding worldwide, we could take the 34.5 Billion dollar market and multiply by about 5x to estimate the worldwide market. That puts the total market for heat conversion at just under 2 trillion.

Now for the economic argument. In a stable and predictable market (i.e. post superexponential growth), the profit from mining is going to be capped by the marginal cost of mining... ALWAYS. This means that anybody who can 'recycle' heat can afford a negative marginal cost, and therefore mine at a loss. The profit from mining will be negative. Simply speaking, approximately 2 Trillion dollars worth of heat can be produced in the mining of bitcoin, and 'sold' to the homeowner to heat water.

There are many possible incarnations of this, but we could imagine a water heater with a heater 'rebate'. Electric power companies could act like mining pools. Since the marginal cost of mining for anyone not recycling heat is negative, the total profit from mining goes negative... It would require more than 2 Trillion dollars worth of electricity to be produced for free. (more than because of additional cooling costs required in a data center).

As a result, the mining centralization we see in Greenland and large data centers becomes enormously unprofitable. Any centralization of mining would REQUIRE heat recycling, which severely limits data centers and necessitates distribution unless you introduce heat pumps, which also increase cost.

So this leads to a new threat for centralization... mining pools operated by Electric Power companies. However, electricity production and distribution is inherently a geographically localized industry (you cannot cheaply transmit electricity across long distances). Therefore the number of power companies are likely to remain much much higher than the number of mining pools today. In addition, since nation-states distrust each other, Most want their own power generation. This makes at least 196 natural divisions.

Thankfully small amounts of heat is something that is needed every season, in every country, in every household worldwide. Data center heat is useless...

Also, 2 Trillion is a huge market for security :-)

Just my musings...."

Bitcoin Difficulty Reversing

2014-12-02T14:24:00+13:00

As the graph below from BitcoinWisdom shows for the first time since just before ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) started to work on the bitcoin network it is possible that we may see a decrease in the difficulty of the bitcoin network. (This just in, it is official, the difficulty decreased to 40,007,470,271 a change of just under a percent. It may take some time for your client to adjust and the number to stabilise)

If you click on the graph and go to BitcoinWisdom the telling like is the green one, it is the actual hashrate of the bitcoin network derived from the average time that it takes to solve a block. You will see that it is below the actual difficulty represented by the red line.

At present the average time over the past two weeks (or 2016 blocks) is just over 10 minutes meaning that the bitcoin network will soon adjust itself down from the current 40,300,030,328 to an estimated 40,050,115,135, that is a decrease of about -0.62%.

For a good and more in depth of how the difficulty works and how these adjustments are made you may wish to check out the difficulty page on the bitcoin wiki.

Has this happened before?

Yes, many times (I have include a table below highlighting decreases for reference). Rest assured that this is not the end of bitcoin and is, at least technically, a normal function of the network. In fact it uses the exact same tried and proven mechanism that has seen the difficulty increase for the past 20 months or so.

Date	Difficulty	Change	Hashrate
Dec 26 2012	2,979,637	-11.59%	21,329 GH/s
Dec 10 2012	3,370,182	-2.00%	24,125 GH/s
Jun 07 2012	1,583,178	-0.50%	11,333 GH/s
May 24 2012	1,591,075	-8.20%	11,389 GH/s
Apr 27 2012	1,508,590	-4.39%	10,799 GH/s
Apr 12 2012	1,577,913	-2.99%	11,295 GH/s
Feb 18 2012	1,376,302	-0.24%	9,852 GH/s

The first difficulty decreases happened in 2011 when CPU mining was still practical and massive botnets were using unsuspecting people computers to mine bitcoins. As these botnets were discovered and taken down by security experts the difficulty took minor hits. As the total network hashrate back then was measured in KiloHashs per seconds (1000's of hashes per second) compared to todays TerraHashs Per Second (1,000,000,000,000's of hashes per second) even a tiny change was felt quite dramatically.

The second set of decreases was due to economics and the imminent arrival of ASIC's. At the time the bitcoin price was measured in dollars (single dollars, not hundreds as they are now) and mining was done with video cards and specialised mining software allowing miners clock their cards up to a typical speeds of about 100 MegaHash per second (A MegaHash is 1,000,000 hashes per second). At the time of the last difficulty decrease on January 23rd 2013 when the difficulty drop to 2,968,775 (a -8.64% decrease) the total bitcoin network was only 21,251 GH/s (or 21,251,000 hashes per second).

Back then, the price of bitcoins no longer justified the electricity it took to run your GPU mining rigs.

Why is the difficulty decreasing now?

Their are many reasons for the difficulty to decrease apart from the obvious statement that there is less hashpower being pointed at the bitcoin network. It is unlikely that the ASIC bitcoin miner manufacturers are voluntarily scaling back production, it is also unlikely that miners are voluntarily turning off their rigs for no reason.

There is a few possible reasons that the difficulty may decrease, but in the end there only one rational reason, economics.

Evidence seems to suggest that even the biggest hashing farms, with the cheapest electricity have reached the point where at the current price of bitcoin cannot justify adding new hashrate to the network.

Where do we go from here?

There are a few possible 'next steps' from here;-

The bitcoin price will increase allowing the current generation of mining equipment to generate more bitcoins for their electricity consumption.
The "Next Generation" of bitcoin miners using more electrically efficient ASIC's will boost us into another period of expansion.

Where it goes exactly is hard to tell, but it will be an interesting phase in the continued development of the bitcoin network.

Are we still safe?

With the network entering a possible stage of stagnation as far as mining hashrate is concerned you may ask yourself if the network can maintain it's safety, after all, securing the network is the main function of all this hashpower.

Rest assured though, even at the current status quo it would take hundreds of millions of dollars and many months of time to threaten the network. I plan to do a series of articles over the next few weeks to explore the possibilities and potential ramifications of the difficulty change that will be happening in less than an hour.

BTCGuild may be closing

2014-11-01T09:39:00+13:00

BTCGuild, one of the oldest mining pools that first opened on the 9th of May 2011 issued a statement on their websiteand redditthat the pool will be closing on the 30th of November 2014.

The full statement from the website follows.

BTC Guild Shutting Down

After many months of consideration, I have finally made the choice to announce the planned closure of BTC Guild. Below, I've outlined the closure process/timeline and reasons that this decision was made.

Closure Timeframe and Process

As identified in the support section and in the 2nd post on this thread, BTC Guild has had an official policy for the amount of time that will be given in the event of closure. The official date that BTC Guild will cease all business is January 31, 2015. This post is the start of the identified 3 months of warning.

Effective immediately, registrations are closed to new users.
BTC Guild mining servers will remain online until November 30, 2014.
Users will have until 11:59 PM (PST) on January 31, 2015 to withdraw any remaining balances on their account.

The above timeline may change if BTC Guild is sold prior to the planned date of closure.

Main Reasons for Closure

1) Risk/cost of a successful attack against the pool. As pooled mining in general is shrinking due to large manufacturers creating private farms, the potential revenue for the pool has gone down as expected. While the pool is still very profitable, the amount of time it would take to recover from an attack has increased due to the overall share of the network shrinking.

BTC Guild has, to date, never been successfully hacked. However, I have seen a rise in attack attempts, and things like Heartbleed/Shellshock which show that efforts are being put into compromising common Linux services if possible. Neither of those attacks had any affect on BTC Guild, but they were both reminders that under BTC Guild's own code, there are many services which could be a doorway into the pool's servers if a vulnerability was discovered.

One successful attack could cost close to a year of pool revenue, maybe more depending on what happens in the mining landscape over that period of time. If something else happened in that time (subsequent attack or regulation forcing closure), it would mean continuing to operate the pool beyond this point has cost me more money than it might potentially make in the rest of its lifetime.

2) US government/regulators are already taking stances against specific business types in Bitcoin, applying requirements which would be impossible for BTC Guild to operate under if they attempt to extend regulation into pooled mining, either directly or indirectly due to unclear definitions. Nobody will mine on a pool which requires them to provide personally identifiable information when they can change a single line in their configuration to point elsewhere.

Additionally, state regulators are starting to make noise about Bitcoin. New York is the first to publicly put anything forward, but there are 49 other states which can put their own spin on things. Due to the ability for states to establish a nexus for businesses dealing with their state's residents, it is a scary landscape to continue operating in.

I have no intention of leaving the US myself, and given the recent history of the US when it comes to online businesses, I don't feel safe simply moving the business legal entity to another country while continuing to live in the US myself.

Aquisition and Users's Privacy/Funds

In the event that BTC Guild is acquired prior to closure, users will not have their mining history and withdrawal history transferred to the new owner. All balances up to the date of aquisition will be retained by myself, and a separate service will be made available to claim any funds owed. I am unwilling to compromise on this, because I refuse to do anything where it puts the users of the pool at risk of not receiving what they've earned under my watch.

Pool Recommendations and Advice

For users looking for a new home for their miners, I highly recommend BitMinter, Eligius, and p2pool. I do not recommend Slush over any of those 3 options, and I actively encourage users to not use Discus Fish or GHash.io. Other smaller pools exist which are run by honest people, but due to their size, it is difficult to recommend them to the average miner.

Closing Words

When I got into Bitcoin back in March of 2011, I never expected anything that we've seen over the last 3 and a half years. I had never built a computer before, never run a server beyond a Gentoo PC in a spare bedroom, and never setup a website that experienced even 0.1% of the traffic BTC Guild gets on an average day.

Bitcoin and BTC Guild have both radically changed my life. While I am closing BTC Guild, I still plan to remain a part of the Bitcoin community. I do believe, even in the face of over-regulation, that Bitcoin will continue to grow and become more useful and usable. I just feel that it is time to move on from BTC Guild, and take pride in the fact that BTC Guild's closure can show that not all Bitcoin businesses end with somebody stealing funds from their users, either by "getting hacked" or outright theft.

It seems though that the bitcoin community is not finished with BTCGuild as a later statement within an hour alluded to the possibility of new owners;-

*BTC Guild Shutting Down - Update 1: BTC Guild May Be Sold* -----------------------------------------------------------

*This is a small update to the previous closure notice. It is likely that BTC Guild will be sold prior to shutting down. As such, while you may want to be prepared to move to another pool, you may not have to. Additional details will be posted if the pool is sold to another party instead of shutting down. As identified in the closure notice, user historical data of earnings and withdrawals would not be transferred to a new owner.*

How I accidentally hacked the igot exchange

2014-09-24T13:47:00+12:00

I agonized a bit about if should post this, igot responded and acknowledged the problem but unfortunately they don't see it as a major issue at the moment saying "Since this is a small amount, this is not going to be investigated on priority."

My mind goes to MtGOX and Moolah though, both are recent examples of an exchange giving out more funds than the client had available (if we believe the official stories) and I think how things could have been different if the person that discovered a flaw in the exchange had, instead of doing what he/she did, informed the exchanges of the problem so the issue could be fixed.

Additionally, just submitting a bug report and leaving it at that is not an option in my mind, people deserve to know about issues like this before they decide on who to entrust their funds to. If it later comes out that the issue was not fixed or other issues were found and it lead to the loss of peoples funds wouldn't I bear a bit of responsibility? After all, I had known something was up, my silence is consent.

The Situation

I am always on the hunt for a new exchange to use in New Zealand. We have one called BitNZ but the order book and volume is quite small.

So a month ago when a new exchange called igot emerged that had New Zealand bank accounts I immediately headed over and made an account. It had been getting a few hits in the local press and it seemed that igot would be ideal for me.

When I try a new service the first thing I do is perform a full "life cycle" functionality test. This test is not to look for vulnerabilities but to go through and use every aspect of the service that I will likely be using. For an exchange like igot the test would be something like this (I do not actually write it down and go through it, testing like this is just second nature to me and I barely think about it);-

Log in/out and get a feel for the authentication.
Deposit a test amount (0.1 BTC).
Withdraw the test amount.

That is as far as I got.

Normally I would have then gone on to exchanging some bitcoins to fiat and then withdrawing the fiat but what happened with the withdrawal stopped me in my tracks.

The Problem

As I mentioned, I got up to withdrawing my bitcoins. I had only deposited 0.1 BTC so I was expecting 0.0998 BTC after fees to be deposited into my withdrawal address. You can imagine my surprise when the transaction popped up in my client not once, but twice.

Here are the transactions;-

As you can see, they were both generated at the same time (2014-09-21 23:58:28) and included 2 minutes later in block 465403 . I have the gmail timestamped withdrawal receipts for both transactions to prove it as well as the acknowledgement from igot that there was a problem.

My igot Ballance

Is this really a problem?

In my mind I can already hear people saying "it was less than $100, what's the issue?". The thing is though, while I have not tried it, who is to say it won't work with 1 BTC or 50 BTC? If I could work out how to do this reliably, who is to say I could not have withdrawn my 0.1 BTC a thousand times. How about a million?

The Method

I cannot say for sure why I got my funds back twice (I did not try to replicate the problem) but there was something unusual going on at my end. Since igot have not placed a priority on fixing this issue though I am not going to go into how I think the problem occurred. As any developer will tell you though, if it can happen once it can happen again, and if it can happen again an exploit can be made to make it happen.

I bare igot no ill will and would hate form something I said to be replicated and used to drain their funds.

I cannot remain silent though, if people have funds with igot they need to know that there is a problem.

What did I do?

Start working on a framework to exploit the problem and withdraw as much as I can? Shame on you for thinking that! :)

I immediately opened a ticket with support to notify igot of the issue;- (click for the full ticket log)

URGENT!!! I am able to withdraw more funds than I have

Hi Guys,

You have an urgent issue, as I have said in the subject, I can withdraw more than have in my account, check my balance, it is -0.1! This is a link to the withdrawl address;-

https://blockchain.info/address/1CXCzUhH1QJ1JfS2s4Bi5izFCy6Wdi4iU

I withdrew 0.1, Yeah, nice try. It would hardly be effective redacting if I just made the background of the text black and left the text unchanged wouldn't it? There is no way I am going to tell you how I think this is done so don't even ask. Here are a few extra words for you to read.

Neil

P.S. If you want to call me my phone number is +64 21 xxxxxx My message to igot

After a few days and providing a bit of extra information I got the message back from igot that I wanted to hear. They have acknowledged the problem and would be working to fix it;-

Thanks a lot Neil.

We will let you know the outcome soon.

It is very unlikely that this would happen, but it has happened and we will get to the bottom of it.Igot support, Sep 23, 2014

At that point I sat back, confidant that the problems was going to be looked at and fixed. It seemed that there was not about to be another "MtGOXing".

It was not until a month later that I thought to bring up the issue again and to my dismay find that they had mostly forgotten about it and were not going to do anything about it.

Hello Neil,

Thank you for contacting igot.com.

This is a technical question that needs investigation.

We're a small team and a ticket has been opened about this with our team.

They will review and give their feedback when they get to the ticket.

Since this is a small amount, this is not going to be investigated on priority.

I will get back to you as soon as we hear from the team.

Don't worry, we're not in the business to go belly up.

Regards,

Julie - Igot support Oct 23, 2014

Conclusion

As much as I would have liked to report an nice clean conclusion where the problems are all gone and everything is fine I can't, it feels to me that this story is only half written. If you think I sound hesitant to go into any depth, your right, I potentially know something that could cause igot, and all of its customers to have their funds drained and I really don't want that to happen. Would have far preferred to be writing about a success story how an exchange found an issue, and promptly fix it, but that has not happened.

Igot's systems has the ability to leak funds and while they know about it, they don't see it as a priority to fix the problem.

I will leave it up to the reader to decide if they should trust their funds to igot or not.

Warning: Do not download bitcoin from SourceForge

2014-09-09T11:32:00+12:00

In a continuation of today's earlier news that Satoshi's email account has been compromised it now seems that the perpetrator has used the email account to compromise other Satoshi accounts.

First, Satoshi's P2P Foundationaccount posted a message warning Satoshi that some of his information was being sold on the darkNet;-

Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the darknet. Apparently you didn’t configure Tor properly and your IP leaked when you used your email account sometime in 2010. You are not safe. You need to get out of where you are as soon as possible before these people harm you. Thank you for inventing Bitcoin.

Followed, rather bizarrely by a request for tips to be sent to the 19pta6x1hXzV9F5hHnhMARYbRjuxF6xbbV bitcoin address. It seems to have already attracted 0.01281469 BTC.

On a more concerning note however, it seems that Satoshi's account at SourceForge has also been compromised replacing all reference to bitcoin in the description to Buttcoin.

The description has since been corrected but there are still bitcoin downloads available and while the dates and SHA256 signatures seem to be correct I would recommend anyone downloading bitcoin to use the official bitcoin.org server.

UPDATE: You should be safe now, SourceForge has deactivated the Satoshi account and rolled back the changes.

Satoshi Nakamoto's email address satoshin@gmx.com appairs compromised

2014-09-09T09:44:00+12:00

Satoshi Nakamoto, much revered and currently missing inventor of bitcoin seems to have had his email address compromised by an unknown agent.

You may or not remember, Satoshi exclusively used one email address when he was active in the bitcoin community, satoshin@gmx.com. If you have a look at the original bitcoin whitepaper you will find it there at the top just under the title. He also usually signed his correspondence with his PGP signature.

Earlier today, the head administrator of Bitcointalk Theymos received an email from Satoshi 'semail address that appeared to originate form GMX's servers and made a post on the bitcointalk forums saying;-

Today I received an email from satoshin@gmx.com (Satoshi's old email address), the contents of which make me almost certain that the email account is compromised. The email was not spoofed in any way. It seems very likely that either Satoshi's email account in particular or gmx.com in general was compromised, and the email account is now under the control of someone else. Perhaps satoshin@gmx.com expired and then someone else registered it.

Don't trust any email sent from satoshin@gmx.com unless it is signed by Satoshi. (Everyone should have done this even without my warning, of course.)

I wonder when the email was compromised, and whether it could have been used to make the post on p2pfoundation.ning.com.

GMX, a free email provider hosted the email and according to Theymos the email does seem to have come form GMX's servers.

Emails from Satoshi can easily be verified by checking their PGP signature, you can download a copy of the signature here and OpenPGP (a free version of PGP) is available for download here. The email in question apparently lack's the signature.

UPDATE: The unknown agent has also seems to use the email address to compromise Satoshi 's account at the P2P Foundation and has now posted;-

Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the darknet. Apparently you didn't configure Tor properly and your IP leaked when you used your email account sometime in 2010. You are not safe. You need to get out of where you are as soon as possible before these people harm you. Thank you for inventing Bitcoin.

UPDATE2: Satochi's SourceForge account now appairs comprised, the perpetrator, rather childishly, is now changing Bitcoin to Buttcoin in the description of bitcoin. It is important to note, the bitcoin source has not been hosted at sourceforge for a few years now but you should not download binaries from sourceforge.

New Zealand Exchange Bitnz.com hacked, 39 bitcoin stolen.

2014-08-12T13:43:00+12:00

New Zealand bitcoin exchange site bitnz.com has been taken by the administrator leaving the message "bitnz.com under maintenance. Apologies for the inconvenience (contact(at)bitnz.com).".

It seems that last monday at 3am New Zealand time 39 bitcoins were transferred from the exchange by an unknown party.

Bitnz is one of the oldest (and perhaps smallest) bitcoin exchanges that started operators on 21 September 2011.

Danial Newton, the administrator of bitnz in a reddit post explained that he believes that the perpetrator gained access to the exchanges outward mail queue at MailJet.com and then set about resetting peoples accounts and intercepting the reset codes. The perpetrator then used those reset codes to logon to user accounts and transfer out the bitcoins contained in the account.

It should be noted that users that had enable 2 factor authentication are safe from this theft. It is unknown at the moment if any accounts with New Zealand Dollar balances are affected.

Danial is in the process of analyzing exactly how the theft took place but has already said that he will replace all of the bitcoin with funds from his own wallet.

The full post on reddit follows;-

On Monday, 11 August 2014 at 3am NZ time, \~39 bitcoins were stolen from bitNZ.

Our email relay service provider was hacked which enabled the attacker to view all outgoing emails. The attacker used this information to reset user passwords and intercept the password reset email. If the user did not have 2FA the attacker was able to log on as the user and initiate a withdrawal.

At the moment I am still analysing the the event and making sure the vulnerability is plugged (revoke email relay access, reset passwords/api-keys, purge sessions, check if user emails were modified etc).

I need to take the time to do this thoroughly so please have some patience. You can contact me at contact@bitnz.com or ask questions on this thread.

I am going to cover the loss. If you would like to donate to help here is the address 1NAVXrA8NnXURzdFNLf79p8YoLPBBfwnFi

13th Million Bitcoin Mined

2014-07-10T12:43:00+12:00

It is in truth a minor milestone but for those who like "large whole numbers" block 310001 has just been mined by Ghash.IO pushing the total amount of bitcoin to 13,000,000.

That means that there only another 8 million to be mined over the next 140 years or so until we reach the total maximum of 21,000,000.

The mining process used to mint new bitcoins and secure the network originally paid out 50 bitcoins for each block but that bitcoin reward halves every 21,0000 blocks. Currently the bitcoin reward is 25 bitcoin every block making it so block 310,001 contained the 13th million bitcoin to enter circulation.

At the current price of somewhere about \$622 per bitcoin that puts the market cap at \$8,086,000,000 (or about 8 billion) US Dollars.

Because of the anonymity features of bitcoin here is no way of actually knowing how many of those 13 million are actually in circulation or who owns them. It is supposed that Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto may have close to 1 million, there are many threads on the bitcoin community site Bitcoin Talk about people loosing bitcoins by loosing their private key's but in the end, a total amount of bitcoins in circulation is just speculation.

However, we can now say that there are 13 million!

Timothy C. Draper won all of the FBI SilkRoad Bitcoins

2014-07-03T09:57:00+12:00

It was quite possible we may have never found out who won the US Marshal Service auction for the 30,000 Bitcoin (just under 20 Million USD at today's rate). It was quite possible that the next time we saw any movement from the address containing the bitcoin (1a8LDh3qtCdMFAgRXzMrdvB8w1EG4h1Xi) it would be on its way to exchanges to be dumped for a fiat currency.

However, this is not the case, well known venture capitalist and bitcoin entrepreneur Timothy C. Draper has come forward and said that he, in partnership with emerging exchange Vaurum snapped up the bitcoin as a as yet undisclosed amount in order to "provide bitcoin liquidity in emerging markets."

Not a lot is known about Vaurum at present apart from that they recently received funding from Boost Venture Capital causing some confusion on Slashdot but their Bitme service is designed to allow the purchase of large amounts of bitcoin in a secure, trusted environment. While it has not been said in the press release it seems likely that Bitme will be next port of call for the 30,000 bitcoins.

29,658.80112195 Confiscated FBI Coins on the move

2014-07-02T07:45:00+12:00

We have been waiting and here it is, the 29,658.80112195 Confiscated FBI Coins held in 1Ez69SnzzmePmZX3WpEzMKTrcBF2gpNQ55 have started their move.

It is not into the eventual 30,000 BTC blocks from the auction yet but I will keep an eye on them and update this post as it happens.

They have been split out into the following addresses;-

1A6mFe9CMLXC4w4PDdbfihVrm33wTjnABD 0.00272195
1a8LDh3qtCdMFAgRXzMrdvB8w1EG4h1Xi 29,656.51316529

It looks as if they are splitting off small change amounts from there.

Where they go from there and who actually owns them is unknown. As mention previously these coins are the first part of the Dread Pirate Roberts stash and there are another 144,341 bitcoins to go.

UPDATE: According to coindesk that is it. One bidder ended up winning all of the bitcoins and they have now been delivered the the winners address (1a8LDh3qtCdMFAgRXzMrdvB8w1EG4h1Xi).

Silk Road 30,000 bitcoin auction causing stirs, what happens when it's 144,341 bitcoin

2014-07-01T10:08:00+12:00

We did not expect the US Marshals Service to release information about the auction of Silk Road bitcoin last week but in the absence of information speculation both on the markets and on the internet is building.

First Barry Silbert, Founder of SecondMarket and BitcoinTrust has tweeted that they were outbid on all blocks.

Since then Alex Walters (a former core Bitcoin developer and the then chief technology officer of Bitinstant) has posted on reddit saying "I Lost" in his \$400 to \$500 per coin. That post was closely followed by another reddit user saying that his bid of \$451.13 per coin was also unsuccessful.

Routers is also now reporting that investment firm Pantera Capital has also been notified that their bids were also unsuccessful.

Meanwhile the actual price of bitcoins of the various exchanges has risen close to 15% from just under \$600 a coin to close to \$650.

In the end, we may never know who bought the confiscated coins or how much they bought them for but it does seem that it will be a pivotal point in bitcoins evolution.

It is anyone's guess what will happen when they decide what to do with the remaining 144,341 bitcoins.

Backstory: It has now been close to 10 months since the FBI raided Silk Road, Arrested the Dread Pirate Roberts (named Ross William Ulbricht in real life) and shut down the hidden tor service. Silk Road had the somewhat seedy reputation of being the Amazon.com of illegal drugs.

In the following months the FBI collected up the pirates stash into two separate piles, the first in the bitcoin address 1Ez69SnzzmePmZX3WpEzMKTrcBF2gpNQ55 totals staggering 29,658.80112195 BTC (or somewhere about \$19 Million US Dollars) and is believed to be the funds that the users of Silk Road had deposited at the time of the raid. This is the bitcoins that has just been auctioned by the US Marshal Service to the highest bidder.

The second amount stored in 1i7cZdoE9NcHSdAL5eGjmTJbBVqeQDwgw is even bigger, totalling just over 144,341 BTC (or over 93 Million USD) is believed to be the pirates personal hoard and is now in civil forfeiture waiting for further developments in the case.

According to the US Marshals Service there were 45 bidders that paid a \$200,000 USD deposit in order to take part in the bidding of the parcels of bitcoin split into nine 3,000 BTC lots and a single block of 2,646 BTC. The the auction, which ran from 6am EST to 6pm EST on 27th June and has now closed.

BrainWallet.org exploited and bitcoins stolen

2014-06-27T12:35:00+12:00

It has long been known that JavaScipt's Math Functions are not up to a good enough standard to be used in Cryptography. In particular the random function has many documented flaws easily available with a quick google search.

It appairs that someone has exploited the weaknesses and stolen bitcoins from people that used brainwallet.org to generate paper wallets.

In a post earlier today reddit user LostAllOfMyBtc said that "35 of my BTC gone. PC not compromised.". The user went on to explain that the bitcoins were stored in 18 different bitcoin addresses that were generated using brainwallet.org's random button.

The BrainWallet.org's "Random" button uses JavaScript's Math.random() function to generate private keys. While it has been hypothesised in he past that because of the low entropy in JavaScript's Math.random() someone could re-generating private keys this, to my knowledge, is the first time that it has appeared to happen.

The story however does take an odd twist when another reddit user (named btcrobinhood) asked LostAllOfMyBtc to prove that he did indeed own the bitcoin (by signing a message using one of keys) and then returned the bitcoins. While people may applaud btcrobinhood for his actions it should be remembered, the bitcoin were only returned after the user noticed they were missing. We don't know how many other peoples bitcoins he has stolen using this method.

It is the morel equivalent of opening other peoples physical wallets and taking the cash found within.

A quick bit of advice from me to you, if you have used any online generator of bitcoin addresses (not just BrainWallet.org) check your balances and immediately transfer the bitcoins to another wallet.

Another Credit Card breach, please use Bitcoin!

2014-06-11T12:28:00+12:00

It has only been six months since Target Customers had their credit card details sold on rescator[dot]so and today we have news of another Credit Card breach at P.F. Chang’s with users details once again up for sale on the nefarious website.

While it cannot be denied bitcoin is still in it's infancy, this is one of the (very many) problems that it aims to solve. It is becoming evident that Credit Card technology is very dated and is fundamentally flawed in our online aware civilization, in this case the magnetic strips are up for sale after P.F. Chang's systems were compromised but in reality all that is needed is a very low tech pen and paper to "hack" your credit card.

If you wanted to use a bit of technology a Photocopier will get the job done.

In my opinion Bitcoin is nearly ready, in the five years since it's inception all of the "component bit's" have been put together. We now have Hardware Wallets, payment processors are now ready and eager (even PayPal is looking into it). Bitcoin ATM machines are popping up all over the map. Point Of Sale (POS) machines are availible.

The Bitcoin Network is now secured by a tremendous amount of hashpower, greater than any supercomputer! And it is growing every day.

The last component, the fundamental component behind bitcoin, the consensus and the will of the people is all that seems to be needed.

Review: Spondoolies-Tech SP10 Dawson (Part Two)

2014-04-01T11:07:00+13:00

In the previous part of this review I discussed how I ended up receiving my Spondoolies-Tech SP10 Dawson. This time around I am going to go a deeper into the Operating System that runs Spondoolies-Tech miners.

The SP10 Dawson comes with a modified version of the MinePeon user interface that is freely available for download on github.

MinePeon users will already be familiar with parts of that they see on Spondoolies-Tech miners but the Spondoolies team has been hard at work and have customised the User Interface and done a full rewrite of the underlying Operating System, I have to admit, I really like what they have done and with their permission I will be porting a lot of what is there back.

The first Spondoolies-Tech addition is that instead of having to hunt for your miners IP address they have come up with an elegant solution where all you need do is go to their management interface page (http://start.spondoolies-tech.com/) and your miner should have already reported in and given basic details so that you can access your miner;-

[caption id="attachment_3030" align="alignnone" width="1203"] http://start.spondoolies-tech.com/ Your Miners device registration page[/caption]

The site will display you public IP (I have blocked mine out), the IP of the mining device on your local network, the firmware version you miner is running, the last time your miner contacted Spondoolies-Tech and finally a link to your miners WebUI.

[caption id="attachment_3027" align="alignright" width="244"] Option to turn off Device Registration.[/caption]

For those that are worried that this might be an information leak about you and your network this "reporting in" can be turned off on the settings page with a simple check box.

Further digging shows that you will find this registration script in /etc/cron.d/pandp_register.sh on the device. The only extra bit of information that is included in the registration is the board ID (mine is FL0914990010) and that is there because it is necessary to work out what firmware version you require.

Disabling Device Registration does exactly that and your miner will never contact Spondoolies-Tech again unless you ask it to (i.e A firmware upgrade request).

Once you have located your miner (via the site provided or from your DHCP server on your router) and entered it's IP into your web browser you will be greeted with an Apache Auth dialogue box asking for your user name and password, it even will tell you the default username and password for the device (admin/admin, I recommend you to change it on the settings page ASAP).

[caption id="attachment_3036" align="alignnone" width="636"] Login Screen[/caption]

After entering your credentials you will be taken directly to the main "Status Screen" for your miner. This will be familiar to MinePeon users but for new users it is a snapshot of what your miner is up to including a graph, general information about version of software your miner is running, details on how your miner is interacting with your pool (or pools) and of course the statistics from your miner's ASIC's.

[caption id="attachment_3039" align="alignnone" width="1182"] Main Status Screen[/caption]

Included are buttons to restart cgminer, Miner_Gate (the supervisory process for the SP10) as well as buttons to reboot and shut-down the entire miner. It should be noted that the statistics from the mining device is not pulled from the cgminer API as MinePeon does but it is pulled directly from the mining hardware.

For some unknown reason (I am working to work out why) cgminer and the pool disagree how many hashes per second the SP10 is doing. It has something to do with the driver and it is being investigated but for the time being pulling the hashrate direct from the device is the best way to get what your miner says it is doing and what the pool says it is doing to match. Rest assured though, if it says 1.51 TH/s at the top as mine does, that is what the pool is paying you for (I checked).

The next screen you should visit is the pools screen, as far as I can tell it is an exact copy of the MinePeon one with no changes. You should get in here as fast as possible so you can set your own pools up.

[caption id="attachment_3041" align="alignnone" width="1180"] The Pools Page[/caption]

Everything here should be self explanatory. You can use my pools as an example (feel free to use my pools even). If there are not enough pools to fit your needs just add a few and submit them and the page will add a few extra blank entry's at the bottom so you can add more.

Once you have entered your pool information you will need to pop back to the status screen and check that they are running. If it is reluctant to change to your pools you can use the "Restart CgMiner" or "Reboot" buttons.

The settings page, while being similar to the standard MinePeon page has settings particular to the SP10 Dawson and has removed the more generic settings that don't apply. Below I have taken screenshots of the new options and have briefly described what they do.

[caption id="attachment_3044" align="alignnone" width="977"] If you find your miner is too noisy or takes too much power you can switch down a gear at the cost of your hashrate.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3045" align="alignnone" width="1041"] Something I have yet to bring to MinePeon standard, you can turn off DHCP and set a static IP address.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3046" align="alignnone" width="1182"] Spondoolies-Tech have added the option to change your SSH password as well as your WebUI password from the WebUI. It is very much recommended you do both.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3047" align="alignnone" width="421"] Option to limit the power draw of the Power Supply[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3049" align="alignnone" width="712"] Finally, Spondoolies-Tech has added an option to set your miner back to the factory defaults.[/caption]

The Firmware Upgrade page is very simple to use. Upon entering the page there is only one button labelled "Upgrade Now" and pressing the button will contact Spondoolies-Tech to check if there is an update. If an updates is available it will download and install the update as I have pictured below.

I know from experience that getting updates to work every time is something that is difficult to do but after looking at Spondoolies-Tech's method I have to approve. Even if there is an issue (such a power cut during the update) the Recovery Image available on the technical blog seems to work flawlessly. Just so you don't have to, I even tried it by pulling the power half way through an upgrade and it recovered my SP10 just fine.

The final page I would like to show you is their ASIC status page. Here you can view detailed information as to what each of your 192 (numbered 0- 191) individual Hammer ASIC's are up to. This is a level of detail that I have not seen before in ASIC manufacturers and while not being very much use to the average user it provides a great deal of information for debugging.

Spondoolies-Tech have been very generous and open with their sources, if you checkout their GitHub Account you will find repositories for everything you will need to build your own "Spondoolies-Tech Miner" if you wanted to. You will find repositories for their Custom Linux Kernel as well as the uBoot needed to boot it. Their version of cgminer is also available to download.

They have even released their propitiatory Miner_Gate software as open source for inspection.

Conclusion (So Far): I am very impressed with what Spondoolies-Tech has done, they have offered me (and any who care to look) unparalleled access to their software and their version of MinePeon is something they can be proud of. Their custom Operating System is well written and looks to be very stable. A lot of what they have done to extend MinePeon will be making it's way back to the standard distribution and they have given me access to their systems so that I may also bring new MinePeon features to Spondoolies-Tech users.

After doing a through crawl thorough the software (far more thorough that the "reader friendly" version above) I can find few faults in what they have done and those fault's that I have found Spondoolies-Tech have already fixed or are in the process of fixing.

Additionally their policy of only selling technology that they have in hand instead of burdening their clients with pre-orders to fund themselves is a refreshing thing in today's bitcoin economy.

What they have done so far is impressive, I look forward to seeing what they will come out with next!

Review: Spondoolies-Tech SP10 Dawson (Part One)

2014-03-28T16:25:00+13:00

About a month ago I received a pleasant email from a gentleman named Stas, he complimented me on MinePeon and asked me if I would have any issue if he included all or parts MinePeon on a new range of miners that he was intending to bring to market. I told him, as I always do, he was free to use MinePeon however he wished.

When I first built MinePeon over a year ago it was intented as a hobby that would be free for anyone to use and learn about bitcoin, mining and Linux in general. It has evolved a lot since then and it will be evolving even more in the future but I have always been pleased when people use it and I invite anyone to use it as if it were their own.

Stas thanked me for my permission (not that he needed it) and offered to send me a unit when it was ready for review and I gladly accepted...... Little did I know what I was in for, people have occasional sent me a USB miner or two to help with MinePeon support but it was only last week that I found out what Stas and his company Spondoolies-Tech were truly up to!

I was first aware of what I was about to receive when Spondoolies-Tech's announced it on BitcoinTalk and Stas sent me a "head's up" email. Along with the unveiling their website, they announced that (in contrast to what seems to be the norm with bitcoin manufacturers) they had actually designed, prototyped and started to produce two new fully self contained bitcoin miners.

The first (the one that I was about to receive) is called the SP10 Dawson and is a 1.4 TH/s 1.25U rack fit bitcoin miner, the second is called the SP30 Yokon and is a 5.4 TH/s 2U rack fit bitcoin miner (to be fair though, the SP 30 is only just hitting the production lines and not already in production).

Anyway enough of how I got one, let's get on to part one of the review.

First, you may wish to have a look at Dogie's review on BitcoinTalk, he has done a tear down of the miner and has quite some expertise in the physical characteristics of hardware and I am not going to try to replicate his findings.

Shipping was via DHL Express (I am told that all shipping will be express) and took 7 days all told to arrive in New Zealand. Believe it or not that is actually quite good for large shipments like this to get all the way down here to the end of the earth. The entire package was 14 KG (just under 32 pounds for the metrically challenged). The packaging as you will see in the photo below is a heavy-duty corrugated cardboard making it not only quite secure and light but quite eco friendly.

[caption id="attachment_2983" align="alignnone" width="972"] SP 10 box opened and upper layer of corrugated cardboard removed showing the front of the miner and the "spondooliestech" branding.[/caption]

After pulling the miner free of the snug packaging and turning it around to show the back you will see 6 small diameter fans as well as the server grade removable power supply.

[caption id="attachment_2980" align="alignnone" width="1288"] Fan's and Power Supply[/caption]

Closer inspection (pictured below) of the front of the miner you will see a USB slot (apparently soon to be used for a wireless dongle), a serial console port (useful for resurrecting dead miner from failed upgrades and other disasters), a 10/100 Ethernet port, two LED's, a recessed button and finally a slot for a MicroSD card to be used for upgrades and recovery.

The top of the two LED's is a "Power On" lead and the one below it is a "Blink" LED that you can enable from the WebUI to help you to find your miner if it is in a rack cabinet among other, identical miners.

It is important to note, these LED's and port's are all on a single board that acts as the controller for the miner. The controller is modeled after the widely available BeagleBone Black ARM7 device and while not being exactly the same in physical layout (the extra LED's, RJ11 console port and button for example) it is functionally identical. So much so the BeagleBone Black version of MinePeon boot's without modification (it does not run the miner yet).

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="642"] The "controller board" part of the miner.[/caption]

Another feature that I would like to point out is the server grade Emerson DS1050 swappable power supply pictured below. It is rated to 1050 Watt's and in actual use the entire unit is pulling 1388 watts at New Zealand's 230 volts at the wall, the total power consumption being below a respectable 1 Watt per GigaHash.

Together with the cooling fans the unit produces a whopping 76 DB of server whine. While this is nothing unusual for rack mount equipment it is certainly nothing you want sitting in your living room (or garage if it is not sound proofed). It is remarkably simular to listening to a Boeing 747 engines at idle when parked on the tarmac.

[caption id="attachment_2979" align="alignnone" width="551"] The power supply.[/caption]

Finally, there is a small plastic bag included in the box that contains a 8GB SD Card, a USB console cable to be used with the mentioned console port and 4 rubber feet for use if you are not planning to rack mount the device.

[caption id="attachment_2997" align="alignnone" width="648"] The extra bits included in the box[/caption]

Installation of the unit was very simple, there are only 2 cables necessary for operation, a network cable and a power cable. After that, configuration will be very familiar to MinePeon users, all you need to do is login to the WebUI (username admin password admin), set your pool and you are done.

All told, once I worked out the right username/password combination (minpeon uses something slightly different, minepeon/peon) it was up and running in minutes.

A quick look at the (very familiar MinePeon) status page it told me that the miner was purring along at 1.49 TH/s .

I am going to end the first part of the review here. I was intending to do a full explanation of my findings about the OS but I soon realised that there was a lot more to cover than I can do in just the single day since I have received the unit.

At the moment I plan to do two more articles, in the next I will be doing a tear down of the operating system, kernel, supervisory processes, mining processes (cgminer) and user interface (all released as open source).

Quite a bit of what is there was written by me and is part of MinePeon but there is also a lot of Spondoolies-Tech code that looks very nice and I will be taking a closer look at. In particular, instead of starting with Arch Linux as a base as with MinePeon they have built their own linux distribution under there to support their drivers and modules. Using a custom build OS can be a bit of a two edge sword, the OS is cut down and very purpose driven (somthing I like alot) but may be a bit daunting for casual coders to work with (I hope to ease that somewhat).

In the final part I hope to bring you a bit more information about Spondoolies-Tech, how they intend to do business and what their future plans are.

MinePeon for BeagleBone Black Alpha

2014-03-25T11:06:00+13:00

MinePeon users have been asking for this for a while and I am finally glad to announce, MinePeon has been ported!

For now it is just for the BeagleBone Black and while it is very Alpha but it appears very stable. Plans for he x86/64 version are still in the pipeline.

I have made up a few quick install instructions below and I welcome everyone who wants to test. I have also made up a sub board on the MinePeon forums for bug reports etc.

Recommended before you start;-

Update your BeagleBone Black to the latest Angstrom with the following link. This is not totally necessary but some old versions required you to push the boot button on the board while booting from the SD card. Newer versions allow you to just put the SD card in and it will boot from that by default.

http://beagleboard.org/Getting%20Started#update

Install Instructions

Download the image MinePeon-0.2.4.6-BeagleBoneBlack-Alpha.img from;-

http://sourceforge.net/projects/minepeon/files/release/

Write the image to a SD card (minimum 2GB). You can use the instructions here for that;-

http://minepeon.com/index.php/Troublesh ... Peon_to_SD

Insert your SD card into your BeagleBone Black, plug in your hubs/miners and power on.
Everything else should be just like the Raspberry Pi.
Report your findings on the MinePeon forums (http://minepeon.com/forums/)!

Neil

ButterflyLabs, sweeten the pot for long outstanding orders.

2014-03-08T14:30:00+13:00

You, and many others (including me) may be wondering where your ButterFly Lab's Monarch's are. If you anything like me you paid \$4,680.00 plus shipping six months ago and have yet to see a single hash!

In these six months the price has dropped by more than half to \$2,196, the December/January delivery date's have come and gone, they have even announced new products. KnC, HashFast and even CoinTerra have started shipping, in some cases they are cheaper and superior miners!

You might be feeling a bit cheesed off at this point (with good reason).

However, there is news. In a post today on Butterfly Labs forums BFL_Josh has broken cover to announce a comprehensive (and somewhat complex) plan to appease us very patient (and tolerant) customers. The new plan goes like this (quoted from the forum post with slight editing for formating);-

Because of the delay, we're offering several different forms of compensation that vary based on order pricing and order date:

\$4680 600GH Monarchs

Free performance upgrades.

All customers who ordered 600GH Monarchs prior to the price decrease on November 28, 2013 will be upgraded to the Imperial Monarch product, which is a new, high performance version of the card. The Imperial Monarch will operate at 1 TH/s (+ / - 20%).

Six Month Refund or Double Shipment Guarantee

If you’ve been waiting in queue for six months or more, you qualify for either a full refund in USD, OR double the hardware you ordered. This latter option will come in the form of (a) first shipping you the new Imperial Monarch, giving you an expected 160-175% of your ordered hashrate, and then (b) an additional Standard 600 GH Monarch at the end of the queue, giving you another 100% hashrate boost, totaling an expected 250+% of your ordered hashrate once all products have shipped. (Note: Electing the refund cancels the Imperial Monarch upgrade offer in the first section above.)

50% off Voucher

If your paid order is less than 6 months old but you paid \$4680 for your Monarch, you will instead receive an Imperial Monarch as described above, as well as a 50% off discount on an additional Standard Monarch at the end of the queue.

Full Price 300GH Monarchs

For 300GH Monarch orders, similar but slightly different offers will be extended. Customers will be contacted with specifics via email soon.

Mining By the GigaHash

If your Mining By the GH paid order is more than 6 months old, you will receive 2x the hashrate purchased.

Reduced Price Orders

Individual orders that are less than 6 months old and that paid for the reduced price 600GH or 300GH Monarch will likely not be delayed past the expected delivery date.

Refunds will be issued in 30 to 45 days from the date of request of refund. Refunds will be in USD.

So it seems if you have the dubious luck to have ordered over sit months ago like myself (I ordered and paid on August 28, 2013, some 192 days Or 6 months, 8 days) not only is your 600 GH/s Monarch going to be upgraded to a 1 TH/s Monarch you are going to get yet another 600 GH/s Monarch for your troubles. That is a total of 1.6 TH/s.

You and I could also get a refund of your \$4,680.00 in some 30 to 45 days (I wont go into how many bitcoins I acutely paid, or how much they are worth now). I have to admit, I am probably going to continue my wait.

NewstalkZB Radio Interview about the MtGox trading halt

2014-02-27T14:19:00+13:00

Much to my surprise on my way home yesterday I received a call from NewstalkZB.

One of the producers (sorry, I forgot her name in my nervousness) wanted to ask if I would not mind going on air with Larry Williams on his Drive afternoon show. Apparently Andrew Taylor, the CEO at Integral Limited, the company I work for had dropped my name as someone worthwhile to talk to about bitcoin matters.

To be honest, I was a little hesitant. I had never been on Radio before and I was worried that I would come off as someone who says a lot of um's and ah's. It seems that with all of the current coverage of MtGOX's demise Larry just wanted to ask a few questions about how bitcoin worked and what the MtGOX situation meant.

I decided to throw caution to the wind and go for it, if you like you can click this link HERE and listen to it.

I would like to thank's to Larry for being genital with me, I quite enjoyed myself and would not mind being asked again. I just hope I did not come off as too much of a nerd.

CoinTerra Announce the The GSX I™ – PCIe Bitcoin Mining Card

2014-02-18T14:09:00+13:00

CoinTerra have been at it again and added a new product to their line up, the "GSX I™ – PCIe Bitcoin Mining Card".

I can already hear people asking, "Wait a sec, where is my TerraMiner that I ordered last August?", but lets not go there for now. That is a totally different story that appears to have no answer (I am still digging).

This time CoinTerra has gone away from the stand alone box that contains miner and operating system and followed ButterFly Labs example of creating a PCI card that is installed into a computer. This solution is similar to the ButterFly Labs Monarch 600 GH/s bitcoin mining card but less expensive while using more power.

The solution passes the responsibility of operating the mining card on from the manufacturer to the client. It is an understandable move by both parties because creating and maintaining a Mining OS is quite a considerable and expensive undertaking (One as the creator and author of MinePeon I am only too familiar with).

The details of the GSX I™ however is a bit thin, there is an accompanying PDF with the announcement with a fairly detailed specification of the card;-

Technical Specifications
Form Factor	Dual-width PCI Express card
ASIC	GoldStrike I 28nm Process Node \>400 GH/s Effective Hash Rate \~400W Power Draw
Cooling	CoolIT DCLC™ (Direct Contact Liquid Cooling) Heat Exchanger 120mm Heat Exchanger Fan
Power Supply Requirement	PC System + 450W
Interface Ports	1 x USB 2.0 Type A 1 x USB 2.0 Type B 1 x USB 2.0 Internal Pin Header
Ambient Operating Temperature	10° to 35°C (50° to 95°F)
Emissions Compliance	FCC / CE

At 1 GH/s per watt plus the power draw of a computer it does not seem to compare well with its competitors though.

Perhaps it is just the thing to get if you are looking to use up for 15% discount from your last pre order with them (while you are waiting for your last pre order to arrive that is).

CoinTerra Hacked

2014-02-03T13:40:00+13:00

It seems that all is not well at CoinTerra.

After last weeks announcement that they were shipping things were looking up for CoinTerra, it seemed that they had managed to squeeze into their revised January 2014 release schedule for their ASIC bitcoin miners. However, if you go check their site now you will find a most unwelcome message;-

The full text on the site (recorded for posterity) reads;-

CoinTerra Announcement
We are currently investigating a malicious attack on our email servers and website this weekend which has resulted in a security breach. We have taken the site down temporarily while we investigate the situation and will bring it back up again as soon as possible. In the meantime, any customers who have placed orders in the past seven business days and have not yet made payment should not make payment via Bitcoin. We would like to make it clear that CoinTerra has a strict policy never to offer to move customers forward into an earlier batch, or to offer discounts or free shipping in return for quick payment. If you have placed an order and paid via Bitcoin since January 31st and have been contacted via email by any person purporting to be a CoinTerra representative offering to discount your order or to move you into an earlier batch, or to sell you a cancelled order from an earlier batch in exchange for quick payment please contact us immediately at itdesk@cointerra.com so that we may investigate it. Please note that this situation will not affect the shipping of units to early customers from our first batches, which is currently in progress. We will post an update with further information as soon as we have more information. Thank you for your patience. Team CoinTerra.http://cointerra.com/ - Recorded 1:00 PM 3rd of January 2014 NZST

As the announcement says, be very cautions of emails that are apparently from CoinTerra.

CoinTerra start shipping!

2014-01-30T11:08:00+13:00

Hot on the heels of an announcement from CoinTerra updating their Engineering and Production Status of their bitcoin mining devices it seems that not only are they shipping, but at least one lucky Reddit customer is up and hashing.

All is not perfect with the miners though, while originally the TerraMiner™ IV was meant to mine at a blazing 2 TH/s bitscavenger, the Reddit user reporting that he has one says the miners typically run at approximately 1.7TH/s.

In the Engineering and Production update CoinTerra admit the shortcomings of their miners stating;-

The production units that we have assembled and tested so far are running at between 1.63TH/s and 1.72TH/s with power draw at the wall between 1900W and 2100W – typically 20% higher than our anticipated target of 1650W but still sufficient to operate in a typical US home (110V) plugged into two outlets on separate 15A circuits, or in a typical European home (230V) on a single circuit.

Additionally the announcement comes with an image of the CoinTerra Team handing over the very first unit to Jake Gostylo.

[caption id="attachment_2910" align="alignnone" width="1024"] “As a long-time Bitcoin miner, I’m incredibly excited to be the first person in the world to get my hands on a production TerraMiner. The performance blows away anything I’ve mined with before” said Jake Gostylo.[/caption]

CoinTerra have extended an olive branch to people with December and January pre-orders to compensate for late delivery and under performance in a follow up email. The two options available are;-

For January or February batch retail customers who wish to receive their TerraMiner order in the currently-shipping specification we will offer a 15% discount coupon* redeemable against their next retail hardware order placed at the CoinTerra website store. If a January or February batch retail customer chooses to accept their order as-is they will automatically receive this coupon.
We understand that some January or February batch customers may wish to request a refund, in which case we will offer a full refund of US dollars received for their order. Customers wishing to request a refund should contact support@cointerra.com with their unique order ID. For those customers who choose the refund option we would like to extend the offer of a 5% discount coupon* redeemable against their next retail hardware order placed at the CoinTerra website store.

As of yet, there is no news about the sold out TerraMiner II – 1TH/s miners also supposed to be delivered in December and January but if you are curious I have asked a question on their forums if you would like to wait for a response with me.

Butterfly Labs Monarch;- Late January to early Febuary

2014-01-17T18:18:00+13:00

After yesterdays news about CoinTerra getting ready to ship it only seems fair to mention, Butterfly Labs are also about to unleash their latest 28nm 600 GH/s Monarch bitcoin miner.

Forum representative BFL_Josh has been keeping a tread open keeping us informed as to the progress of the Monarch that was originally due for shipping December last year. In today's update he has posted that they are one step closer to shipping giving us an image of an actual Monarch wafer at their testing facility.

In the post Josh mentions that from this point, the plant will also slice up the completed wafer as well as package it into the familiar package that we call chip's.

From there Josh points out, because these 28nm chip's are based on their existing 65nm design used in their current products the testing and tuning of the new chip's is not expected to take long. This will hopefully lead to manufacturing and delivery to take place some time at the end of this month or the beginning of the next.

However there is a already large amount of pre-orders that Butterfly Labs needs to fulfill so if you order one of the \$2,196 Monarch cards today you would not be receiving it until at least March this year.

CoinTerra TerraMiner IV prototype starts hashing at 1.62TH/s

2014-01-16T09:32:00+13:00

While only achieving 80% of their performance target, CoinTerra have released photos and a short video of their new ASIC bitcoin miners in action.

They not achieved its full 2 TH/s performance yet they seem confidant that the goal will be achieved saying “We hope you’ll appreciate that our engineers have been making continuous tweaks and refinements each day to improve the power efficiencies on the board to increase performance."

CoinTerra is a recent entry to the Bitcoin mining industry announcing on August 27, 2013 that they would be offering a 1 TH/s and a 2 TH/s model to be delivered last month in December 2013. They have not met their expected delivery date it now seems that they are close.

[caption id="attachment_2885" align="alignnone" width="600"] A real, working TerraMiner IV makes its world debut![/caption]

If delivered today, their 2 TH/s TerraHash IV would net you a tidy sum of 0.56204898 bitcoins a day or somewhere close to \$500 US Dollars.

[caption id="attachment_2886" align="alignnone" width="600"] A rear view of the TerraMiner IV on a (slightly) messy workbench[/caption]

However if you were to order today it would cost you \$5,999 and would not be expected to be shipped until May, four months from now. With the difficulty climbing at current levels, and soon to be even further increased by these devices and the soon-to-be-released Butterfly Lab Monarch it is anyone's guess if they will ever make a return.

Cointerra GoldStrike™ASIC wafers schedualed for December 17th

2013-12-13T11:08:00+13:00

With the difficulty continuing to climb at an unprecedented rate the next jump is only just around the corner.

US company CoinTerra originally entered the Bitcoin ASIC miner market only 4 months ago in August. The plan at the time was to build 28nm ASIC processors running at an impressive 1.4GHz that would achieve 500 GH/s. To do this they secured \$1,500,00 in venture capital and assembled a team of engineers with some impressive credentials.

The original offering was a ASIC Bitcoin miner that will sell for \$13,999 capable of sustaining 2 TH/s and was to be delivered this month (December 2013). As with most mining hardware companies though, delivery is going to be late but according to the latest blog post made today on the CoinTerra site it seems that delivery is imminent;-

Today we can announce that we have now entered the final phase of the fabrication process and we have received target dates from our partners regarding finalization of key components in the GoldStrike™ I ASIC chip:

FABOUT

The fabout of the first wafers for the GoldStrike™ I is scheduled to occur on December 17th

The wafer etching process in which the blank wafers are etched with the chip layout at the foundry is complete and the chip leaves the foundry for bumping.

BUMPOUT

Following the fabout, we have a projected bumpout date of December 21st

The bump process attaches solder balls to the wafer, which is then flipped over and attached to the substrate during packaging.

CoinTerra

This announcement was not the only bit of news from CoinTerra today, in another blog post they also gave us a look at the already in fabrication and production PCB's and Case. The first image below is the top of the board that hosts two GoldStrike™ 500 GH/s chips for a total of 1 TH/s. The chips displayed on the board are "dummy" chips used to optimize the manufacturing process.

Also present are the DC/DC converters to power the chip and an unnamed microcontroller presumably use to run them. I cannot make out what the controller is though.

The next images is of the bottom of the PCB and shows very little of interest apart from demonstrating how big the DC/DC converters are.

The last image shows a complete assembled TerraMiner™ with a single GoldStrike PCB board in place. If you were able to get you hands on it today (with working chips) that single unit would be able to produce 0.55364787 BTC a day, or in US Dollar terms just under \$500 a day.

Before you go to your bitcoin wallet though (they accept bitcoin or bank transfer) even though they are meant to be shipping within the month there is a long backorder queue and if you are not already in the queue the soonest you could possibly expect to get a miner would be the \$5,999 April 2014 Batch.

Additionally, even if you do decide to spend the \$5,999 (or just under 7 BTC at today's rates) for the 2 TH/s TerraMiner™ miner that would arrive in April 2014 it is uncertain if you will ever make a return on your investment because of the current rate that the bitcoin difficulty is increasing.

DICLOSURE: I have a TerraMiner II – 1TH/s, Networked ASIC Miner (Early January Batch) on order, I will review it once it arrives.

Creativity. Is it an issue with Bitcoin & Crypto Currencies.

2013-12-10T10:37:00+13:00

I don't often write about subjects that are not directly related to mining but this morning I will make an exception.

During my morning reading of Slashdot an article caught my eye, it was entitled "Study: People Are Biased Against Creative Thinking" and it linked to an interesting article on www.slate.com written by Jessica Olien titled "Inside the Box" or the more appropriate (in my opinion) subtitle of "People don’t actually like creativity.".

In the article Jessica explores the ideas of a publication from Cornell University in 2011. The paper conducted two separate studies and came to a conclusion that I did not expect, apparently there is a bias against creativity and while people desire creative ideas, they often reject them. The study goes on to find that when presented with a creative idea people will more often than not be unable to recognise it as such.

When I read the (rather long-winded) abstract from the paper I could not help but apply it to bitcoin and other crypto currencies;-

People often reject creative ideas even when espousing creativity as a desired goal. To explain this paradox, we propose that people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt, and which is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty. In two studies, we measure and manipulate uncertainty using different methods including: discrete uncertainty feelings, and an uncertainty reduction prime. The results of both studies demonstrated a negative bias toward creativity (relative to practicality) when participants experienced uncertainty. Furthermore, the bias against creativity interfered with participants’ ability to recognize a creative idea. These results reveal a concealed barrier that creative actors may face as they attempt to gain acceptance for their novel ideas.

It has always been somewhat of a mystery to me as to why some people seem to automatically dismiss bitcoin as either a Ponzi or Pyramid Scheme dispute showing few if any of the traits but thanks to Cornell, I think I have a better understanding.

Is it that bitcoin and crypto currency's are just too creative an idea to be accepted by most?

However, there does seem to be a silver lining to the paper. It seems that if successful eventually a creative idea will be accepted and celebrated as such, unfortunately though it is only when the idea has made it "out of the box" and is considered the norm.

KnCMiner on my doorstep

2013-11-09T15:23:00+13:00

Some time ago (the 11th of August to be exact) I decided to take a bit of a gamble and order one of KnCMiners lesser offering the Mercury 100 GH/s bitcoin miner.

Mercury's are no longer available but all up with shipping I spent \$2,148.00 USD (I actually paid just over 20 bitcoin at the time). I had my doubts that it would ever return a profit (even more so now) but it was a bit of mining gear, and I had to have it.

After a few months waiting and a week and a half's delay in New Zealand customs (they really have no idea what bitcoin is and I think they were looking inside the box for the slot bitcoins come out) , I am glad to say it is finally here!

As you may or may not know, KnCMiners don't come with a power supply so armed with the "manual recommended" paper-clip I installed an old 450 Watt power supply that I had lying around but I could not stop there, so with great glee I popped the case off to expose the inner workings.

Not much in there is there? That is because this is the Mercury and only has one ASIC unit, the bigger units come with more. The Saturn comes with two and the Jupiter comes with four.

You can still see the basics though, on the left is the controller board with a BeagleBone Black on top of it and to the left of that is the actual KnC ASIC unit.

After plugging in and finding the IP address of the unit the status page above showed up in my browser with very little real information and once filling the pool information on the "Mining" page below and doing a quick restart it is up and running.

Using the magic of Highcharts you can see it hashing away here;-

(I will leave this up if you want to come back and check on its progress)

Browsing the official KnCMiner forum I found out there were several "firmware" updates. I tried a few of them, including the latest 0.98.1 but in the end it seemed that my unit worked best with the 0.95 version that it came with.

CONCLUSION: At an average of 97 GH/s and the difficulty climbing all the time it will probably never pay for the 20 BTC that I invested in it but apart from that it seems a relativity well-engineered ASIC Bitcoin miner.

The user interface and firmware system has a lot to be desired though. My next mission it to task MinePeon to run these things.

The end of bitcoin is nigh! (Again)

2013-11-06T10:15:00+13:00

It seems a week does not go by that the end of bitcoin is not predicted. Most recently Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer of Cornell University wrote a paper describing how "Selfish Miners" might be able to subvert the network to their own purpose. The regular news publishers quicklyjumped on the article to spread their own version of the story.

While some of these harbingers of doom are technically correct (as is the case of the Cornell University paper as far as I can tell) it seems the gap between possibility and practicality often gets overlooked.

This was in my opinion eloquently illustrated by Peter Todd, a bitcoin developer who wrote a nice bit on the Bitcoin-DEV mailing list outlining an new flaw in the bitcoin network that gave me a bit of a laugh and I thought I would share it (with permission);-

"Here's a perfectly plausible worst-case scenario, that could be
happening right now: RAND High Frequency Trading Corp (a subsidiary of
General Evil) has a low-latency network of fiber,
line-of-sight microwave, and some experimental line-of-site neutrino
links criss-crossing the globe. They can get data to and from any point
on this planet faster than anyone else. Of course, in addition to their
spectacular network they have an immense amount of computing power, as
well as exotic overclocked liquid nitrogen bathed CPU's that run at
clockspeeds double what commercial hardware can do; in short, they have
access to scalar performance no-one else has. Of course, they like to
keep a healthy reserve so 99% of all this fancy gear is constantly
idle. Whatever, they can afford it.

RAND just hired a bunch of fresh MIT graduates, the best of the best.
Problem is the best of the best tends to make not so best mistakes, so
RAND figures a Training Exercise is in order. Fortunately for them the NSA (a
subsidiary of General Evil) slipped a rootkit into my keyboard a week or
so ago - probably that time when I woke up in that farmers field with a
*splitting* headache - and are reading what I'm typing right now.

I go on to explain how an excellent training exercise for these fresh
MIT graduates would be to implement this nifty attack some Cornell
researchers came up with. It's really simple, elegant even, but to do it
best what you really want is the kind of low-latency network a
high-frequency-trading corporation would have. I then point out how a
good training exercise ideally is done in a scenario where there is
genuine risk and reward, but where the worst-case consequences are
manageable - new hires to tend to screw up. (I then go on to explain my
analog electronics background, and squeeze in some forced anecdote about
how I blew up something worth a lot of money owned by my employers at
some point in the distant past)

Unfortunately for the operators of BTC Guild, one of these new MIT grads
happens to have a: passed General Evil's psych screening with flying
colors, and b: have spent too much time around the MIT Kidnappng Club.
He decides it'd be easier to just kidnap the guy running BTC Guild than
fill out the paperwork to borrow RAND's FPGA cluster, so he does.

As expected the attack runs smoothly: with 30% of the hashing power,
neutrino burst generator/encoders's rigged around the globe to fire the
moment another pool gets a block, and the odd DoS attack for fun, they
quickly make a mockery of the Bitcoin network, reducing every other
miners profitability to zero in minutes. The other miners don't have a
hope: their blocks have to travel the long way, along the surface of
the earth, while RAND's blocks shave off important milliseconds by
taking the direct route.
Of course, this doesn't go unnoticed, er, eventually: 12 hours later the
operators of GHash.IO, Eligius, slush, Bitminter, Eclipse and ASICMiner
open their groggy eyes and mutter something about how that simulcast
Tuesday party really shouldn't have had an open bar... or so much coke.

They don't even notice that the team from BTC Guild has vanished, but
they do notice a YouTube video of Gavin right on bitcoin.org doing his
best Spock impression, er, I mean appealing for calm and promising that
Top Men are working on the issue of empty blocks as we speak. Meanwhile
CNN's top headline reads "IS THIS THE END OF BITCOIN?!?!"

It takes another hour for the Aspirin's to finally kick in, but
eventually all get on IRC and start trying to resolve the issue -
seems that whenever any of them produce a block, somehow by incredible
coincidence someone else finds another block first. After a few rounds
of this they're getting suspicious. (if they weren't all so hung-over
they might have also found suspicious the fact that whenever they found
a block they saw a sudden blue flash - Cherenkov radiation emitted when
those neutrinos interacted with the vitreous humour in their eyeballs)

It's quickly realized that "somehow" BTC Guild isn't affected...
GHash.IO and Eligius, 22% and 13% of the hashing power respectively,
decide to try a little experiment: they peer to each other and only each
other through an encrypted tunnel and... hey, no more lucky blocks!
slush, 7% of the hashing power is invited to the peering group next,
followed by Bitminter, 6%, and Eclipse, 2%, and finally ASICMiner, 1%,
for a grand total of... 51% of the hashing power!

Of course, just creating blocks isn't useful for users, they need to be
distributed too, so someone quickly writes up a "one-way firewall" patch
that allows the group's blocks to propagate to the rest of the network.
Blocks created by anyone else are ignored.

It takes a few more hours, but eventually the attacker seems to run out
of blocks, and transaction processing returns to normal, albeit a little
slow. (20 min block average) Of course, soon there's a 3,000 post thread
on bitcointalk complaining about the "centralized pool cartel", but
somehow life goes on.

The next day Gavin goes on CNN, and gives a lovely interview about how
the past two days events show how the strength of the Bitcoin network is
in the community. For balance they interview this annoying "Peter Todd"
guy from "Keep Bitcoin Free!" who blathers on about how relying on
altruism or something will doom the Bitcoin network in the long run.
After the interview Gavin respectfully points out that maybe next time
they find a so called "developer" with a ratio of bitcointalk posts to
actual lines of code in the Bitcoin git repository better than one
hundred to one. The producer just wishes that "Mike Hearn" guy was
available; at least he's got a sense of fashion, sheesh!
Anyway, I'm out of space for my little story, but yeah, the ending
involves a group of now-rich pool operators who decide to start a large
financial services and data networking company, oh, and time-travel..."

Peter later sent me a message saying (referring to the Cornell Paper);-

"To be clear, the attack is real as far as we know, and may very well
pose a serious threat to Bitcoin in the future. However right now
we should take advantage of the fact that nearly all Bitcoin miners
would be willing to co-operate to stop an attack, and use that time to
give developers a chance to carefully think about this issue, as well as
others like it. We have plenty of time to come up with good solutions
that have proven themselves through thorough analysis, peer review, and
testing. Sure, this process won't happen overnight, but we can afford to
take the time to do things right, rather than rush out an ill-thought
fix."

I must admit that I have even used reductio ad absurdum in describing some of bitcoin's (well documented) vulnerabilities but I thought Peters new vulnerability deserved a greater audience than just the bitcoin-dev mailing list. Perhaps we will see it referenced by CNN in the future.

50BTC.com say's "50BTC is alive".

2013-10-29T08:44:00+13:00

It has been a hard week and a bit for the 50BTC mining pool. After it was first noticed that incorrect balances were showing for users on the 20th of this month and revelations that "Our billing server have been hacked, some parameters currently shown incorrectly. At this moment we are working hard to restore actual user balances. Please be patient it can take up to 24 hours.".

Now it seem that the recent DDOS that they have experienced my be connected as well as a possibility of an inside job in their own data centre. In an update today 50BTC go part way in explaining their difficulties and goes on to say that "50BTC is alive and will get back fast and stable as a hell in next few weeks." but it seems from their statement that anything is far from certain.

What is certain though is 50BTC's dramatic fall in hashrate from 105,492 GH/s on the 20th to a puny 6,977 GH/s today (one fifteenth of what it was just over a week ago) seems to be mostly due to 50BTC.com's reluctance to communicate with its frustrated customers.

The full update from 50BTC.com on Bitcointalk follows;-

Status Update

After the attacks that we’ve experienced from August 2013 till the October we’ve lost user balances data and huge part of the funds. We still can not figure out the full list of vulnerabilities that have been used to perform the attack. One of the assumptions is physical unauthorised access to our servers which could take a place only if someone got an access to the hardware in datacenter.

Also we can’t rule out the possibility that someone found or create an exposure or backdoor in our billing software.

Currently we have few topics to deal with:

First thing that we’ve been able to figure out is that few fast miners have been cheating us using vulnerability in difficulty checking algorithm. This vulnerability is probably applicable to the other fair pools, so we will publish description in next few hours to help others avoid our fate. This difficulty fraud have led to the loss of the significant part of the funds.

Second thing is incessant DDOS attacks that started in early August and magically stopped in few days after billing was hacked (that seems to be the last stage of the attack).

Third thing is that we have weird jumping luck during August-September period which jumped from 40% to 120% daily and sharply increased hash rate of the few new users with abnormal large amount of stale shares.

Obviously this couldn’t be a regular coincidence and obviously this can’t be applied by one certain user. In general all of this only make sense if one or few competing pools decided to eliminate 50BTC for whatever reason. We are exploring all available data to figure out if some users was not real users but the proxied shares from the evilpool.

When miner formally connects to the evilpool it actually goes to the 50BTC through a proxy to get a job, and after that evilpool proxies all shares except of winning ones back to 50BTC. This could cause total bad luck that we’ve faced in a last few weeks.

But this is for sure not only things we will find in the next few days, before we will get the confidence that funds in pools wallets are safe. Only after that we will put additional funds and will enable payouts.

Still we are looking forward into the future with a hope and working damn hard rewriting our billing subsystem and moving our hardware to the another datacenter.

For all our users who believe in us and for all those bullshit fuckers who think that 50BTC is dead and already celebrating their victory, we have one main message:

50BTC is alive and will get back fast and stable as a hell in next few weeks.

Stay tuned 50BTC.com on Bitcointalk

MinePeon 0.2.4 Release

2013-10-27T17:44:00+13:00

It's that time again, and I have to say, this is a monster of a release. I would especially like to thank the crew on the MinePeon Forums for going through the Pre Releases with me and testing and of the various changes and improvements.

No need to read all this, just go over and grab yourself a copy now.

New Build System

The underlying system in MinePeon has gone through and entire rebuild focusing on stability and performance, just about every file has gone under scrutiny to make sure that you will be getting the most out of your miners.

As an almost by-product of the process a new build system has been written that will enable MinePeon to be ported to other architectures and devices so expect to see cubeboard and BeagleBone Black ports soon.

Miner Configuration

One of the most often asked questions supporting MinePeon is how to change miners and add parameters.

Miner configuration is all done from the WebUI now, you can change miners, add and remove parameters, add delays and generally get MinePeon to do anything you want when it starts up the miner process.

Device Support

The mining industry has seen a lot of new devices hit the market recently (or shortly about to), the guys at both cgminer and bfgminer have been hard at work supporting them.-

Compiled into cgminer 3.6.3 there is support for the drivers for;-

Avalon.ASIC, BFL.ASICs, BitForce.FPGAs, BitFury.ASICs, Icarus.FPGAs, Klondike.ASIC, ModMiner.FPGAs

Bfgminer 3.3.0 comes with the following drivers loaded;-

avalon, bfsb, bigpic, bitforce, bitfury_gpio, cairnsmore, erupter, icarus, littlefury, modminer, proxy, proxy:getwork, proxy:stratum, x6500, ztex

Plugin's

So that developers can easily extend MinePeon a plugin system has been developed. So far tehere are only two plugings;-

MinePeon Plugin: MobileMinerApp by forum regular tk1337.

MinePeon Plugin: PiMiner where I have adapted the PiMiner code for Adafruit RGB Negative 16x2 LCD+Keypad Kit.

More plugins are already in the works.

Backup

Backup has over gone an overhaul and now you can backup all your settings and statistics with one click and then restore them just as easily.

Future

Now that this release is out I am going to start to focus on extending your MinePeon out onto the internet. My intention is to create a site where you can manage and maintain your miners from wherever you are. This all requires time and effort so bear with me.

Unfortunately the new features will cost actual currency by my intention is to keep everything free as possible, but this all depends on your donations so keep them coming in.

Neil

P.S. For the curious, below is a graph of what is being donated right now.

50BTC hacked, don't believe your account ballance

2013-10-20T11:34:00+13:00

If you log in to you 50BTC.com account you're in for a pleasant surprise, unfortunately it is one that wont last.

It seems that someone has gained access to 50BTC's servers and managed to increase all of our balances, the website recently put up a message saying;-

Our billing server have been hacked, some parameters currently shown incorrectly. At this moment we are working hard to restore actual user balances. Please be patient it can take up to 24 hours.

In the below screenshot the MinePeon backup account has accrued a total of 659.66862212 BTC or \$117,722.29 USD at today's rates.

I have not tried to withdraw my new-found balance, and I suspect that it wont work.

First look: BlueFury USB Bitcoin Mining Device

2013-10-18T19:41:00+13:00

Being the author of MinePeon the Linux mining appliance for the Raspberry Pi usually involves late nights debugging strange errors submitted by one of it's thousands of users, compiling software and upgrading packages. While it is far from a thankless job, every now and then the perks are even better.

A few weeks ago Beastlymac from Big Picture Mining approached me to collaborate on getting support ready for his new BlueFury mining devices built into MinePeon, I of course jumped at the chance. I quickly produced a few test images of MinePeon using both cgminer and bfgminer that were successfully able to drive the device.

[caption id="attachment_2729" align="alignright" width="200"] MinePeon, Hub & BlueFury[/caption]

Job done I thought, and then Beastlymac offered to send me an early 'developer version' so that I could maintain support. I jumped at the chance.

Today it arrived so I pulled a new Raspberry PI out of its box, wrote the current development version of MinePeon 0.2.4 PR2 to a SD card, plugged it all in and set it going.

Within seconds and the small addition of "BPM:all" to bfgminers start up command it was hashing at a respectable 2440.925 MH/s (2.4 GH/s). I have yet to get it working with cgminer but it is only a matter of time now.

NOTE: As I said, this is a development version, the full production BlueFury devices expected any day now will look slightly different and have different performance characteristics.

Avalon Gen2 Launch, design your own device

2013-10-04T16:23:00+13:00

Avalon today announced that they are back in the game and will start to release information on their generation 2 chips to open source developers.

It seems that Avalon will be going ahead with their plans not to make bitcoin mining devices but to focus solely on building the ASIC processors and supplying them to anyone wanting to build their own mining device.

They have gone as far as to create a competition where 50 open source hardware developers will receive a small amount of Avalon Gen2 55nm ASIC chips. The prize for the best design/designs (they have not made it clear how the prize will be awarded) will receive 5000 Avalon Gen2 chips.

The rules seem simple enough (from the announcement);-

there are 50 available slots, if picked contestants will be given 10 chips each.
all design submitted for this contest will be released back to the community when contest ends.
must be original design, not a modified version of our reference design for example.
application are accepted now until the 10th of Oct.
chips will ship out soon as candidates are screened and accepted.
contestants will have 1 month to complete and submit the design.

If you wish to enter you will need to head over to Avalon and fill out a simple form.

It is unclear what the specifications of these new Avalon 55nm Gen2 chips will be but with competitors already working on 28nm chips they will certainly have their work cutout for them.

KnCMiner video update

2013-10-01T11:25:00+13:00

After yesterdays update that KnCMiner where about to start shipping the official KnCMiner thread on BitcoinTalk burst into life with over 500 post by people speculation about when, where or even if we will see a KnCMiner device.

In a news update, posted at 9:04:00 PM September the 30th (their time) KnCMiner finally gave us a look at their Jupiter 400 GH/s mining device that they say will start shipping today.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFOcI8nK2xI]

In what is probably the most impressive bit of information from the video release they claim that the 400 GH/s mining device actual speed is 576 GH/s, a full 44% faster than the device was promised to achieve.There has been no update on the Mercury 100 GH/s or Saturn 200 GH/s mining devices slated to ship at the same time but I am sure a 44% increase in hashrate will be well received.

Bitcoin pools under attack (DDOS)

2013-10-01T10:43:00+13:00

Several bitcoin mining pools are reported to be under attack from an unknown source. The affected pools are under a heavey DDOS(Denial-of-service attack) causing unusually high loads on their pool servers and shares are being lost.

It was first brought to my attention this morning when several of my miner's dropped BTCGuild and started to hunt for an available pool. After switching to using 50BTC they also came under attack and posted a message in their private members area stating;-

Dear users! Our pool is under a DDoS attack, we are doing our best to restore the normal operation as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Eleuthria, administrator of BTCGuild confirmed in a BitcoinTalk thread that they were "Still under constant attack.".

The attack is significant enough to show on bitcoin data collection and visualisation site http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ .

[caption id="attachment_2694" align="aligncenter" width="550"] http://bitcoin.sipa.be/[/caption]

There have also been reports that Slush and GHash.io have been targeted as well.

73.9 TH/s of KnCMiner bitcoin miners about to start hashing?

2013-09-30T09:22:00+13:00

KnCMiner fist announced that they will be entering the Bitcoin ASIC marked back on April the 9th of this year.

Their first line up of miners was an impressive one at the time, ranging from the Mercury 100 GH/s bitcoin miner up to the Jupiter 400 GH/s miner with the Saturn 200 GH/s miner as a middle of the road offering.

Since then, the Mercury 100 GH/s miner has been taken of the market (they still will be delivering ones that have been ordered, just not accepting any new orders) and both the Jupiter and Saturn have had their price cut.

The original plan was to ship some over the early orders of miners in "the end of the September/October" but as of yet there have been no miners shipped but according to their news on their website only 4 days ago;-

The big news is that all the production orders that are due for delivery before October 15th have now been confirmed with the factory for final assembly and our production schedule is now locked.

That all taken into account, according to the KnCMiner Order tracking thread on BitcoinTalk there is a minimum of 72.9 TH/s (probably more) about to join the bitcoin network.

With the Bitcoin Difficulty growing over 90% in the last month only time will tell if any of these new miners will every pay back their investment.

DISCLOSURE: I have a Mercury 100 GH/s on order.

TerraHash close and offer clients a 50% refund

2013-09-27T13:00:00+12:00

It seems there has been another ASIC manufacturer has failed to deliver.

TerraHash originally entered the market on May 8th of this year with the goal to manufacturer the Klondike Open Source Mining Board coupled with Avalon ASIC processors.

TeraHash today announced on BitcoinTalk that "Some events happened last week, that have forced us to make a decision to go out of business." In the post (quoted below) TerraHash explain that a series of failures lead to this decision. In particular the hold-up of ASIC ships from Avalon and the "failure of the Klondike Project".

TheraHash then went onto say that they will be asking for a refund from Avalon for the chips they have ordered and will use that to refund orders to apoximetly 50% of their value.

The announcement was immediately met by hundreds of posts on bitcoin talk by customers of TerraHash asking when they could expect their refunds and why it would only be 50%.

Some events happened last week, that have forced us to make a decision to go out of business. A lot of issues compounded to press us to do this. The failure of the Klondike project was one. Chase, our bank, shut down our accounts. Also the delay in the shipment of the chips has resulted in a lot of customers asking for refund. We already owe a lot of money to PayPal, and with all the refund requests, it is impossible for us to continue our operation profitably. So we have decided to dissolve the company.

We are going to ask for a refund from Yifu. As soon as we get a refund from him, we will start refunding all the orders. We will be able to refund about 50% of every order with this amount. We are trying to get our money out of Chase, which will help us refund another \~5% of each order. We are trying to return as many components as we can, and as soon as we get more money back, we will send additional pro-rated payments to each order.

Once we get a refund from Yifu, we will be sending an email to everyone asking for a current Bitcoin address where to send the payments.

Disclosure: I have no orders with TerraHash.

KnCMiner drop their prices

2013-09-03T08:35:00+12:00

In their latest news letter KnCMiner has responded to the increasing difficulty and new products being announced by their competitors by dropping the price on their core line of miners.

They have discontinued the Mercury 100 GH/s line of miners all together leaving only the Jupiter 400 GH/s and Saturn 200 GH/s available for purchase.

They go on to say that as promised anyone that has previously ordered any of their miners (Jupiter, Saturn or the discontinued Mercury) now can expect their miners to be shipped no later that October the 15th (a mire 42 days from now) while any new orders for the Jupiter or Saturn will be shipping anywhere from mid-November on wards.

The new pricing of the miners are as follows;-

Jupiter 400 GH/s Bitcoin Miner is now \$4,995
Saturn 200 GH/s Bitcoin Miner is now \$2,995

That amounts to a \$1,000 price drop, but remember, you will be receiving those units at least a month after KnCMiner has gone into full production of their existing miners.

DISCLAMER: I have an order for one of JNCMiner's Mercury 100 GH/s bitcoin Miners

Butterfly Labs to allow you to upgrade your existing pre-order to the 28nm 600 GH/s Monarch

2013-08-30T10:43:00+12:00

It seems that Butterfly Labs have come up with an interesting plan to move clients from one pre-order queue to another.

In their most recent news letter they have announced that if you are still waiting for your Butterfly Labs device as they work through their back orders you now have the option to change from your existing device to the new Monarch 600 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Card.

[caption id="attachment_2658" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Butterfly Labs Monarch 28nm Technology Bitcoin Mining Card[/caption]

The Monarch is the 'Next Generation' of Bitcoin Mining Devices that uses the far more efficient 28nm chip manufacturing process instead of the current 65nm process allowing for faster speeds, less power consumption and smaller packaging.

Apparently if you take them up on the deal you will be charged a 10% restocking fee on your original order and then the remainder will be applied directly to the \$4,680 USD price tag of the Monarch.

With the difficulty sky-rocketing to 65,750,060 at the moment, and looking to be close to 87,000,000 in a week it is a tempting offer for the serious bitcoin miner.

DISCLAMER: I have already ordered a Monarch before the 'trade up' deal was announced.

MinePeon gets its own Support Forums

2013-08-29T15:22:00+12:00

Lately the amount of inquirers/requests/suggestions that MinePeon is generating via forums/emails/PMs/IMs has grown to such a level that I have absolutely no hope to keep up with them all (and that annoys me, I feel everyone deserves an answer).

To that end, I have decided to do something that I should have done a long time ago, I am building MinePeon its own set of forums is that I can better support you, the user. Additionally there are some very smart MinePeon users out there and I am hoping that they will share their wisdom with us.

There is not much there (yet) but if you have a question/comment/support need (or just want to say hi) head over. The URL is;-

http://minepeon.com/forums/

MinePeon 0.2.3 release

2013-07-15T17:54:00+12:00

Update time again!

There are so many changes underneath the hood that the change log is huge (see below for the full details). You don't need to re image, but if you don't your going to be missing out on quite a few improvements, some of which cannot be distributed through the git system. Some highlights that need testing and your feedback;-

Thomas's AngularJS GUI

If you go to the web interface and click on 'Advanced' you will see the beginnings of a new dynamic interface written in JavaScript and AngularJS by Thomas. Not only does it replicate just about everything in the old static interface but it has a pile of cool new features that need your testing and feedback.

Full rebuild of underlining Arch Linux

I have spent quite a bit of time rebuilding everything with a close eye on optimization and stability. A lot of old problems should be sorted out but as always they need to be tested.

Email notification of issues.

You can now set tolerances for miner count and hashrate and MinePeon will send you an email notifying you of any problems, and it will even attempt to fix the issues in a future update.

Miners now run as minepeon instead of root enabling finer control of the mining process.

The biggest change under the hood is how the miner process is run, it is now run as its own user enabling the monitor process to kill and even restart MinePeon.

Vastly improved donate system.

Please try it out, the donations help and they are getting close to the point that I can actually make MinePeon a part time job and cut back hours from my 'real job'.

Donations now also take place at midday your timezone so you can keep a closer eye on it but the stability problems when restarting the miner seem to have been solved.

Full change log as follows;-

https://github.com/MineForeman/MinePeon

302bb51 (HEAD, origin/master, origin/0.2.2, master) Version update in preperation for a new image
2680132 Kill the miner on restart
6fb0def Kill the miner on restart
92285a8 cgminer 3.3.4
071ccea Sleep for 60 secconds to avoid monitor scripts
faa1f0b Cleqanup of test code
ea14c56 Cgminer 3.3.3a
b683570 Cgminer 3.3.3
475cb97 Add flag when donation is active
2c66f6a cgminer 3.3.2
2d956de Donate changed to 12 (midday) so that if it buggs people can catch it
565c05c Minor miner updates
28b7384 Change default to BTCGuild as a test
e0b6a59 Change default to BTCGuild as a test
871b4c3 Add monitor checks
b6df3c5 Quit the miner instead of restarting it
94d940c Remove debug code
b0580d3 Add hashrate checks
c1bb6df Merge pull request #4 from thgh/patch-1
5008a17 Fix donate
fbc3920 Fix varable names
313538e Move email to functions.inc.php
f08aac0 Add deviceName to alerts
9618200 Add deviceName to alerts
c6c964a Add device count alert
e3fa4c7 Move donation to .conf file
2e4cefd Remove timezone.inc.php includes and file, all moved to settings.inc.php
0d12826 cgminer updates
3da7add Merge pull request #3 from joeykrim/patch-2
fe3fdcd Added some clarification information around the structure of the repo
0ae1ddc Miner updates
b6b94a1 bfgminer 3.1.1 ==> 3.1.3
e8b1b61 Merge branch 'master' of github.com:MineForeman/MinePeon
f84b9dc Better handeling of miner restarts
88c5216 Merge pull request #1 from joeykrim/patch-1
9778213 Cleanup unused variables
5ee9fa0 Fix BTCGuild Donate address
6457079 Remove files in etc
c02def5 (origin/0.2.1) Cleanup versioning in etc

https://github.com/MineForeman/MinePeonWebUI

46e866b (HEAD, origin/master, master) Kill the miner on restart
e6df3f3 Merge pull request #48 from mariogrip/patch-1
91b235b fixes "Kitten Killer!" to the right position
b24ae49 Merge pull request #45 from thgh/master
d3b875e Merge pull request #44 from joeykrim/patch-2
5d3bde1 Restore and import backup functionality 90% tested Needs zip installed Needs 770 on directories etc/ and var/ (possibly 777?) Works :-)
c2a8cb7 Added example placeholder values for Email alert fields: Device Name, E-mail and SMTP server
8e67ffc Added example placeholder values for Email alert fields: Device Name, E-mail and SMTP Server
27654c3 Merge pull request #43 from joeykrim/patch-1
e1bc84f Add clarity by changing chart visibility text based on the visibility state
e9acf2c Changed text from "Toggle charts" to "Display extended charts"
d0aa41e Merge pull request #42 from thgh/master
abb64db Much better backup page
0a51dda Merge pull request #41 from thgh/master
3896336 Added: download a stored backup as .zip
1b6f180 Don't throw exception when miner is down
9b9ea4b Merge pull request #40 from thgh/master
edeb244 Solve errors in log: f_settings
c4e0b17 Solve more errors
a7c4295 Repeat password to save it
0f1dc7b Restart only button and set alerts visible
5c34a7a Avoid errors in log
7630a94 Use h3 instead of legend
a6c97fc Merge pull request #39 from thgh/master
edd992e Merge remote-tracking branch 'refs/remotes/mineforeman/master'
8d74af4 Merged
a42e721 Merge pull request #38 from thgh/master
034c024 Merge remote-tracking branch 'refs/remotes/mineforeman/master'
f16ab06 Little bugfixes
8b6732e Splash screen, not sure about security
eaa60e3 MineForeman link
114dfec Merge pull request #37 from thgh/master
166ad60 Miner configuration editor works now
801ef29 General fixes in UI, merge restore into backup, add miner configuration page
97c47ab Stop SSL redirect if running from the CLI
86621d8 Standard hashrate symbology
c98c91c Update js libraries, removed unused files, little fixes
c9f48fc Merge pull request #36 from thgh/master
0b89bf7 Fixed alert after settings saved
dbf5fb8 Better settings, added Main controller, nicer colors
40c0672 Added pools in settings When cgminer is down, an alert will show in the WebUI
1a87e04 Fixed time bug and some details
44e1b84 Merge pull request #35 from thgh/master
62332f6 Merge pull request #34 from thgh/master
e90dc03 Less borders on tables and better alignment
a4839ca Merge remote-tracking branch 'refs/remotes/mineforeman/master'
ea43372 Better way to save settings, save password and set timezone. Added alerts
4853a9e Merge pull request #33 from thgh/master
837e0d3 Merge pull request #32 from thgh/patch-1
c627486 Important file to backup
01467bc Optimization in Advanced > Status
7f2d017 Update README.md
cc88d95 Merge pull request #31 from thgh/master
78a3971 Removed debugging code should not have been committed
1038b0b Merge pull request #30 from thgh/master
f97a3df All settings variables correctly named
224f691 Merge pull request #29 from thgh/master
fbc108d Fix compatibility between both settings pages
41e0bdb Fix compatibility between both settings pages
d3a7684 Remove old variable names
953d729 Merge pull request #28 from thgh/master
ca72011 Merged
fb9f831 Added setting miningRecover: Automatically attempt recovery Removed old variable names
d481a0a Merge pull request #27 from thgh/master
a5524c7 Added settings page and lots of bug fixes
fc68c47 Merge pull request #26 from thgh/master
6fd6cef Quick fix smtp input
f45c18b Merge pull request #25 from thgh/master
68ac931 Fixed button:focus in class peon-settings
599addb Cleanup advanced menu & statusbar
96aac1c Merge pull request #24 from thgh/master
c602efb Status page in angular, statusbar in a seperate controller
d23bcdc Realtime statusbar with angular
7cc4719 Merge remote-tracking branch 'refs/remotes/mineforeman/master'
f6a768d Beginnings of realtime miner status in Advanced > Status
94def0f Remove ellipsis class from pool URL
3f06f55 Merge pull request #23 from thgh/master
cf392ba Add sqlite database + phpliteAdmin Might have to change permissions to get it working
d7a12f2 Added restore from backup page
5cde8a2 More comments and some optimization in f_copy and f_miner
e90e786 wut
4f90fc8 Remove unused advanced.php
da3602b unused copy
5cd976b Merge remote-tracking branch 'refs/remotes/mineforeman/master'
670b87a Add functions.inc.php for generic functions
d3630dd forgot to remove menuitem
873d0ff Added "advanced" page built with angular, added advanced > backup Restore from backup to come
5f0f5d6 Update README.md
e956d5c Logo in navbar
f633d2b Nicer settings and pool settings, removed pool labels
7cac401 Save space in pools by using only the URL
f178dab Fix response from f_miner, kitten to footer
bb51f35 Donation plea to footer
596aec8 Toggle for more charts, better pools table
13a399a update bootstrap.js just in case it will be used
1b0902f remove unused files
fd27082 static navbar instead of fixed
574e0b1 Cleanup pool settings, saving with ajax, miner restart with ajax
9f17fcb Add Minimum Expected Harshrate in settings for an Alert
64bcaf9 Merge pull request #21 from thgh/master
f7221e0 Cleanup styles, fixed tablesorter, update to bootstrap3RC1
17d13ec Remove all set buttons and replace with one save settings button
fd9349b Add deviceName for alerts
711f52d Add alert settings
b298ad3 Add email setting for alerts
5392bff Move donation to .conf file
6eea541 Move timezone to .conf file
809b0b2 Remove ssl.inc.php includes and file, all moved to settings.inc.php
73b6e63 Remove timezone.inc.php includes
1aae7eb Move timezone functions to settings.inc.php & Move timezone functions to settings.inc.php
cb7da28 Remove plural from labels (more spaces saved)
f2bad7f Apply small tag to a few labels
034bac4 Add css rule for small and large to better format things
a576e3e Add css rule for stats table and reduce font to fit
871a05e Remove Diff Stale (not used anymore) to reclaim space in pools table.
b58f724 Merge pull request #20 from joeykrim/patch-1
c08f096 Added miner device row error highlighting if error rate over 10% or rejected rate over 5%
49b3c67 Merge pull request #19 from joeykrim/patch-2
e14603e Added CPU Load averages
03829cf Merge pull request #18 from joeykrim/patch-1
b8f0e66 Added conversion to F for us metric challenged Americans ...
c0a3d88 Added temperature to the MinePeon Status
df66009 Merge branch 'master' of github.com:MineForeman/MinePeonWebUI
65e041d Add JSON_PRETTY_PRINT to output of miner config files
1d0b051 Merge pull request #16 from joeykrim/patch-1
3d0bde9 Adjusted percentage calculations to only be performed if the divisor is not 0 clearing PHP Warning error in Apache error_log
33b6e7c Merge pull request #15 from joeykrim/patch-1
0b3d1c3 Updated percentage calculations for mining devices status
0730d77 Merge pull request #11 from joeykrim/patch-4
f1ee7a0 Merge pull request #14 from joeykrim/patch-6
d355519 If pool is alive, set row class to success - highlight green
e2c25dc Added Difficulty Stale column, count and percentage to the pool status table
4633c32 Removed unnecessary \</td> tag
2ab2c7c Merge pull request #12 from joeykrim/patch-6
c4e73dd Swapped spelling of variable named responce for response
2ba364f Moved percentage calculations to the Difficulty based statistics
4689958 Updated percentage stats for overall pools
9521383 Another typo in license, thanks Phil

Neil

MinePeon 0.2.2 release

2013-07-14T13:09:00+12:00

Download it HERE.

I was not planning a release today but a user has come across a serious bug. It seems when switching pools on BitcoinTalk user klotzenhotz's miner hang instead of completing the operation and ended up mining for the wrong account (the donation one, I am so embarrassed!).

It could have just been a glitch (they happen) but after extensive testing I have decided to kill the mining process and restart it instead of just letting the mining process do a restart. This should prove to be a much reliable method to switch pools and the extra few milliseconds wont be noticed.

The Live Update is included in this release but I warn you, it is VERY ALPHA so don't use it until I say, and even then use at your own risk.

New Features;-

Clicking on a hashrate value will take you to a simple calculator that will estimate your bitcoin return.

Very Alpha Live Updates.

Improvements;-

Better handling of miner restarts. The miner is now forced to quit and restart instead of just restarting. - MineForeman

Re-sync time every 5 minutes until you are in the year 2013 or more (slow routers and wireless connections NTP time fix). - MineForeman

Percentages for Reject, Discard and Error have been added to the WebUI. - MineForeman

The form and POST processing can handle more than 3 pools dynamically scaling up to 20 - joeykrim

Fix typos in settings.inc.php - geeknik

Miner Updates;-

bfgminer 3.1.1 ==> 3.1.3

Arch Linux Updates;-

gd-2.1.0-1
libdrm-2.4.46-2
libvdpau-0.6-2
mesa-9.1.4-5
mesa-libgl-9.1.4-5
mrtg-2.17.4-2
php-5.4.17-1
php-apache-5.4.17-1
php-pear-5.4.17-1
php-sqlite-5.4.17-1
pygobject2-devel-2.28.6-9
python2-gobject2-2.28.6-9
raspberrypi-firmware-20130707-1
raspberrypi-firmware-bootloader-20130707-1
raspberrypi-firmware-bootloader-x-20130707-1
raspberrypi-firmware-emergency-kernel-20130707-1
raspberrypi-firmware-examples-20130707-1
raspberrypi-firmware-tools-20130707-1
vim-7.3.1287-1
vim-runtime-7.3.1287-1

Enjoy & good luck bug hunting!

P.S. Please try the donation option, I REALLY need it tested so that I can reliably switch pools, even 1 minute world do.

SatoshiMine USB Block Eruptor sales re-open

2013-07-12T11:08:00+12:00

After my rather disastrous dealings with MtGox it has taken me a bit of time to re-organise things so something like that would never happen again, but I am glad to say that all of my duck's are in a line and I am ready to reopen satoshimine so that us international folks can get their hands on some bitcoin ASIC goodness.

The offer is simple;-

1.3 BTC per ASICMiner USB Block Eruptor 300 MH/s
0.5 BTC for 2-6 day tracked shipping
Free tracked shipping for orders more than 5.
I ship ANYWHERE!

If you're too impatient head over there now, but come back afterwards. I was new to eCommerce and trading with bitcoin on a commercial level and I have learned a few things running the first two group buys that I would like to share with you and whoever wants to get into bitcoin eCommerce in the future.

In true David Letterman style, here are the biggest lessons I learned;-

6. 'Normal Mail' is sloooooow. I mean incredibly slow, it may be because we are now used to firing messages around the world in seconds but I was shocked to learn how slow. The idea that a package could take weeks to get from one place to another did not even occur to me to be honest. I put in multiple insurance claims on devices after 10 days only to learn that they were received on day 20.

What they were doing I don't know (sightseeing on the way??), but it is slow.

To cure this problem (as much as possible anyway) anyone who orders 5 or more devices gets upgraded to tracked and signed 2-6 working day tracked shipping. Even if you are buying one device there is an option to upgrade your shipping.

5. Make things easy for people. Believe it or not my biggest time waster running these group buys was people that could not write down their address correctly. I had (in my naivety) left a text box for people to put in their shipping address, I just assumed that people knew how to fill in their address (especially since that was where their miners were going to be delivered!).

People forgetting to put in their country was the most common problem but that was easily solved (google maps for the win), closely followed by no Zip/Post code.

The most time consuming one though was people who forgot to put in their name!

The new addressing for SatoshiMine orders is a vast improvement, it takes advantage of javascript/ajax and the google places API. By the time you have typed out the first 10 characters of your address the order form will be filled out for you (with exception of your name and email address, you still have to put in those :P )

4. Know your price's. There seems to be a culture within bitcoin group buys to cut your margins as thin as possible, I have seen a few group buys where the markup is 5% or even less. Taxes, packing and shipping have to be paid for, bitcoin price must be accounted for, and it all needs to come out of that 5%.

Worst of all, if anything goes wrong (and things do, see MtGox) you have to make sure that you are able to work your way out of it without stiffing your clients or going to live in your car.

Its also important to reward yourself! Believe it or not, people don't mind paying for good service (provided that you give it to them).

3. Have multiple ways of 'cashing in' your bitcoins. This was my biggest downfall, living in New Zealand as I do the local market is nearly non existent for large amounts so everything is an overseas wire transfer.

I now have successfully tried out 4 ways of turning bitcoins into the cash I need to run these group buys so this wont be an issue again (hopefully).

2. Bitcoin is for eCommerce Brilliant! Building an eCommerce system with bitcoin is an absolute programming pleasure!

I don't even know how to begin to describe how well suited it is for eCommerce but it leaves PayPal, Credit Cards and Bank Transfers in the dust.

1. Communication is critical. Your clients want (and deserve) to know what's going on. When I hit my recent issues and could not continue until now it could have gone very bad for me. I was in possession of peoples bitcoins, other people were still waiting for shipments from me, if I had handled things wrong I could have been the latest [Bitcoinia | Bitcoin Savings & Loan | Scam | Ponzi - take your pick].

Luckily for me I am quite chatty when I get behind a keyboard. When things went sour, despite feeling a bit foolish for not having a contingency I told everyone everything.

A strange thing happened, while I was sorting things out, only one person asked for a refund and I got offers of bitcoins and cash to help me out (I did not accept any but thanks to everyone who did).

To add to that people actually continued to order knowing all of my problems, so much so that we are actually 80% of the way to putting an order in with ASICMiner already! (Everyone who stuck by me gets upgraded shipping by the way, thanks guys).

I wonder how many of the infamous "Bitcoin Scams" could have been averted by people biting the bullet, admitting there are problems and dealing with people instead of hiding from them.

Anyway, thanks everyone for your support, satoshimine.com has now re-opened.

More info on the MtGox 'Temporary Hiatus on U.S. Dollar Withdrawals'

2013-06-21T14:16:00+12:00

I have a tale of woe. It involves MtGox and my personal dealings with them.

First, I will tell you a bit of the back story so that you may understand my woe.

When ASICMiner first introduced their buy policy last month for their new Block Eruptor USB 300 MH/s bitcoin miners on the 5th several BitcoinTalk uses generously setup threads where people could band together to make up the minimum number to order (it was 300 but it was later reduced to 50).

The person that set up the group buy would then make the order from ASICMiner and once they had received the miners they would repackage them and sent them onto their new homes.

I, living in New Zealand had a problem though. These group buys were localised to a few geographical regions and as normal for us Kiwi's we were not in any of them. In fact, over 70% of the world's population was not able to get the new bitcoin miner. It is quite understandable though, international shipping is a pain and very expensive with the customs charges and shipping itself, not to mention all the declarations that must be filled out.

So I decided to get the miners that I desired I would set up my own group buy, and this one would be an international one open to whoever wanted some ASIC goodness no matter where they lived. Out of necessity it was going to be more expensive than the other group buys to cover my shipping and customs charges and it was going to be a lot of work but I decided that it was a public service to the bitcoin community and bitcoin itself that I would be glad to make. It also ment that I would have to neglect mineforeman.com a bit but I though that the end product would be worth it.

My first group buy was a great success with 115 miners sold and sent onto their new homes in 6 continents and 34 countries. Most people have even received their miners excluding a few that I am still working on (as I said, international shipping is a pain but don't worry though, I paid extra for the insurance).

The only problem with that group buy is that I, as a soft-hearted individual lent several people bitcoins while they organised their own to pay me back so I would get to keep none of those 115 miners. NONE! There was only one solution in my mind, run a second group buy.

The second group buy also went well. 60 miners ordered, paid for and earlier this week they were shipped off to their new homes. Better yet since the people who I loaned bitcoin too had paid me back (mostly, you guys know who you are and you will continue to hear from me) 10 of these shiny new miners were mine and were silently hashing away at 3,3 GH/s attached to my MinePeon! To add to that people were still wanting to get miners so I set up a third group buy so they would not miss out.

Now we come to my tale of MtGox woe.

My only real option to turn bitcoins into cash is to use MtGox. I had used them before, in fact I had used them mid last month to transfer a few thousand dollars worth of bitcoin to cover some of my mining operation expenses. As soon as group buy one closed I transferred another 3,000 USD in order to cover some of the various shipping and customs charges.

Unfortunately the money had not shown up by the time the first 50 miners arrived at my location on the 5th of this month but that was OK, I just paid for all the customs and shipping charges myself and sent a note to MtGox asking them to look at it. They sent back a note saying they would and expect it to be resolved in the next 3 days.

When the last 65 miners of group one arrived (after going on a DHL holiday for a few days) on the 13th and the money still had not come through I thought "fine, I will just dip into my overdraft and use my credit card". I try my best to do what I say when I say it and it was not fair of me to visit my MtGox issues on people who had ordered miners. Needless to say though I once again contacted MtGox and received the standard "3 days" message.

I did however have a bit of concern about the 60 miners that were already on their way to me from group buy two, but as I already mentioned, when I say I will do something I will do it. I would just have to abuse my overdraft and credit card a bit more.

On the 19th as I had finished shipping out the 60 miners from and the money still had not arrived (and my overdraft and credit card were abused black and blue) I sent another note to MtGox, this one more of a "Please guys, help a brother out" message I waited for my response, dreading that I would get yet another "3 days" response.

What I got was something else altogether, and to continue my tail I will go into another form of story telling I call the email log;-

Hello,

I still have not received the transfers, could you update me on your
progress.

Thanks

NeilMe to MtGox - June 20, 2013 05:25

Hello Neil,

Thank you for the email. Sorry for the delay and inconvenience caused. As we are not sure about the ETA. We will keep this checked and update you.

Best regards,

Mt.Gox Team
https://www.mtgox.comMtGox to Me - June 20, 2013 08:56

At least it was not another "3 days" message I thought, but then;-

Hello,

Sorry for the delay and inconvenience caused. We are currently making improvements to process withdrawals of United States Dollar (USD) denominations, and as a result are temporarily suspending cash withdrawals of USD for the next two weeks.

We have given a official announcement please check with the below link

https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130620.html

Best regards,

Mt.Gox Team
https://www.mtgox.comMtGox to Me - June 21, 2013 03:16

Best regards indeed, but surely they dont mean my two week old transactions I thought.

Excuse me?

Please check the dates on these withdrawals that I am trying to get you to process;-

2013/06/05 09:25:49 \$1,000.00000
2013/06/01 20:03:16 \$1,000.00000
2013/05/31 15:55:05 \$1,000.00000

Even the most recent was 16 days ago. This 'suspension of withdraws' does not apply to me.

Can you please confirm that.

Neil FinchamMe to MtGox - June 21, 2013 05:14

Hello Neil,

Thank you for the email. All the usd transaction has been suspended for two weeks, once the withdrawal is processed we keep you updated

Best regards,

Mt.Gox Team
https://www.mtgox.comMtGox to Me - June 21, 2013 05:14

Are you telling my that withdrawals as far back as the end of last month
were never processed to begin with?Me to MtGox

Thank you for the email. All the usd transaction has been suspended for two weeks both the existing and new., once the withdrawal is processed we keep you updatedMtGox to Me

These transactions were from over two weeks ago, the only way you could suspend them is if you did not process them at the time. Is this the case?Me to MtGox

We keep this checked and update you.MtGox to Me

No, you will give me a straight answer. Were the transfers processed two weeks ago or not?Me to MtGox

The withdrawal has been processed from our end , but due to some issues it didn't reached your bank account. We are working on it to solve the issue . Once solved we will update youMtGox to Me

Can you confirm that since the transactions are two weeks old they are not included in your current two week suspension?Me to MtGox

All the existing and new withdrawals has been suspended for two weeks, we will keep you updated once the issue got solvedMtGox to Me

I am not happy with this and I think I deserve a better explanation than "All
the existing and new withdrawals has been suspended for two weeks, we will
keep you updated once the issue got solved".

I suggest you go talk to your manager and come up with
a satisfactory reason as to why or even how you can suspend a transaction
that occurred two weeks ago.Me to MtGox

Silence... (I dont mean they sent me a message saying silence, they just never got back top me)MtGox to Me

So there is where my tail of woe sits at 8:08 AM this morning, apparently the suspension does apply to me and my two week old transactions.

As I finish this post it is just past 3 pm with no resolution or answers just a bruised bank account and credit card. For those that worked with me for the first two group buys I thank you and assure you that if you have not received the miners yet they are on their way and for the few people that their miners are over due I assure you I will sort it out (I paid extra for insurance after all). For those few that I lent bitcoin to and stiffed me, I will be hunting you down.

I said I will do it and I have, my main regret at the moment is that I will have to close group buy three and refund your bitcoins (please reply to your original order email with a payment address, I will be in touch soon).

This ends my tale of woe (so far), before you feel sorry for me and start sending me red cross packages please don't. While I did overextend myself it was not by much and I did the calculations at the time to make sure if it all went sour I would still be OK. I will not be living in my car nor will I be skipping any meals, even if MtGox imploded right now (after reading this) and never returns a penny I will still be fine.

Perversely I rather enjoyed writing this and I hope you enjoyed it too (you read to the end after all). Stay tuned for updates!

P.S. As soon as I hit publish I will be sending this to MtGox. :p

P.P.S. As I proof read this as best I can (I am dyslexic, writing does not come easy to me) I realise that you may have the impression that I have a burning hate for MtGox, well, I don't. I wish them luck, and if they survive their current issues I will continue working with them. I believe that this current hiccup is probably 10,100 times worse for them than for me and I suspect that there are some larger issues at play here.

P.P.P.S. MtGox, if you're reading this, you may wish to keep your customers better informed though, that is my only real issue.

International Block Erupter USB closing - Last chance to get ASICMiner Block Eruptor ASICs

2013-05-27T17:23:00+12:00

Update: A new group buy has opened here.

Fantastic news, due to changes of the rules of ASICMiner Group Buy's we no longer need to reach 300 in order to buy the devices, we only need 50!

That means we have reached the minimum order and I am preparing to close the group buy. I will not close it immediately to be fair to the people who are in the process of securing bitcoins for their purchase. On the other hand I need to close it as soon as possible to be fair to the people that have already paid and have been waiting,

To that end, I will be closing at Midnight on Wednesday the 29th of May 2013.

That means all of you that have been waiting to see if this group buy will succeed before sending your bitcoin still have time to get in on the group buy go going to;-

https://satoshimine.com/

Thanks to all that have put in orders already and have supported us, there is not long to go now.

MinePeon Beta 1 - code name "Butterfly Bob" Released

2013-05-26T08:58:00+12:00

I am pleased to announce that after hundreds of hours of testing by hundreds of testers and goodness knows how many hours of my time MinePeon is out of Alpha and has been released as Beta 1, code named "Butterfly Bob".

Feel free to skip my ramblings and ignore the rest of this and just go download it now.

It has now been tested successively with just about every USB miner known to man and more importantly because of Butterfly Labs generous gift of a development unit I am glad to say it is as ASIC ready as I can make it.

I would like to say thanks to the legion of people who have downloaded MinePeon and tested it to destruction, every one of your emails was a valuable resource to me. I would like to thank Butterfly Labs again for sending me one of their ASIC's for the final stages of testing in my small way of thanking you guys I have named this release after you (sort of).

If your still here, or your just after something to read while your downloading you will notice cosmetically very little has changed in this release. There is a new 'Settings Page' that allows you to set your WebUI password and your TimeZone and that is about it, what has changed though is that all of the brilliant work by the cgminer and bfgminer crews has been build in with full ASIC support. I have also included the udev files for Cairnsmore FPGA devices, so they 'may' work.

If you have any problems don't hesitate to contact me directly, I am keeping a list of user contributed HOWTO's over on the wiki and I will update the official page soon. You also may wish to check the forum threads over at BitcoinTalk or Butterfly Labs.

All there is left for you to do now is download and install it!

If your looking for ASIC's to buy and use with MinePeon there is very little choice at the moment. You may wish to try Butterfly Labs, they are starting to get into production and I have to say I am happy with the one that I am using for testing.

Alternatively Avalon ASIC also are shipping ASIC units and you may be able to get in on one of their batches, but they come with a full mining controller so while you can use MinePeon with them you don't have to.

The final choice is to get some of ASICMiners Block Eruptor USB 300 MH/s devices, while you cannot get them directly from ASICMiner (unless you buy 300) I have set up a group buy on BitcoinTalk that you can order them for 2.6 bitcoin each (you will be doing me a favor as well).

New manufacturer enters the Bitcoin ASIC Arena with the Cryonic FrostBit™

2013-05-24T11:38:00+12:00

A new contender in the Bitcoin ASIC mining world has announced their intentions to produce a with what I have to say is the best looking piece of bitcoin hardware I have seen yet.

The Cryonic FrostBit™ ticks all of the boxes for people wanting to mine bitcoins in style and features include;-

1000 GH/s core (1 TB/s).
2800W max peak-power consumption.
Liquid Nitrogen cooling.
Arsenic-free polycarbonate outer shell.

All for the tidy sum of \$14,995 per unit.

I wish them luck in getting these devices into market and hope they will consider sending me a free 'development' unit like Butterfly Labs did last week.

Does Ted Nelson know who Satoshi Nakamoto is?

2013-05-20T13:44:00+12:00

With the bitcoin conference going on there has been a renewed bout of interest as to the identity of Satoshi.

While I personally have no idea who the inventor of bitcoin is the famed IT Sociolosopher and creator of such terms as "hypertext" and "hypermedia" Ted Nelson thinks he knows and has just created a rather interesting and amusing video explaining who he thinks Satoshi Nakamoto is;-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=emDJTGTrEm0

While I am still not convinced I must say that with his deep understanding of mathematics Shinichi Mochizuki is a good a candidate as any and a lot better than most.

Butterfly Labs Bitcoin ASIC mining device arrives in New Zealand

2013-05-15T15:11:00+12:00

It happened, ever since last month when Josh from Butterfly Labs let slip that a developer unit of their new 5 GH/s ASIC bitcoin miner might be on its way to me I have had trouble sleeping. I have spent the days watching the courier van come and go, my friends, family and co-workers have even noted to me how down I look.

I had begun to think that Josh and Butterfly labs were running some cruel geek version of the classic Pavlov's dog experiment on me.

That was until yesterday when I received a call saying that there was a package for me that has been sitting in the courier depot since the 2nd of May.... 12 days ago!!!

I don't know how or why, but despite the big sign outside the company I work for (pictured below, Integral Limited, second one down) at 99 Sala Street the FedEx guys did not seem to have been able to find me and this poor ASIC miner had been sitting there gathering dust.

I was not about to get into recrimination though, my heart had literally speed up just hearing the news so I jumped into my car and raced (at a safe 50 km/hour) the 5.7 kilometers to the depot where it has been sitting patiently for me all of this time.

The box was nondescript, not at all like the fancy boxes that I had seen photos of when Dave from codinginmysleep.com received the first demo unit last month on the 20th and apart from my address (correct address that is) there were a few hand scrolled notes on it saying "?Who" and "Where at 99?" (I later found out it was one of their standard boxes, assembled inside out).

I was not expecting anything else though, and the Butterfly Labs logo on the top was a dead giveaway. Barely stopping for breath I handed over my ID, signed the docket and I was on my way back to plug it in.

In my mind there was only one host to plug it into, my Raspberry PI running the development version of MinePeon that had been sitting on my desk faithfully running a ZTEX single core FPGA (that now sits discarded in the corner) that a client had lent me for MinePeon development for over two months without interruption. I quickly striped the peon down, put it on a small coffee table with the BFL ASIC, plugged it in and set it to work.

I have put a lot of work into MinePeon as a ASIC host so I was really hoping that it would work first time so I was pleasantly surprised that in the 10 to 15 seconds that it took me to sit back down at my desk it had booted, detected the BFL 5 GH/s miner and was mining!

Within a few minutes the hashrate had stabilised and my first Butterfly Lab ASIC (or my first bitcoin ASIC of any sort) was running at 5.4 GH/s, a full 12.5% faster than the advertised rate. The graphs on the MinePeon user interface told the story better than anything else.

At the current difficulty of 11,187,257 the hashing output that it is generating of 5.4 GH/s equates to 0.2428 BTC per day, or \$25.92 US Dollars.

The account I used was an old account at Slush's pool, these days I only run a few miners on it and they are old GPU's in machines that sit about in my office doing very basic tasks like word processing and spreadsheets, my notebook is in there too though (for the little that it is worth).

Soon Slush was reporting similar numbers to what the miner was saying, it was averaging about 5.4 GH/s.

In the 24 hours since then it has not missed a beat. It seems to be happy to use about 44 watts all up including the Raspberry PI and while it is warm to the touch the core is only running at 61C. To my great surprise it was only using 1.2% CPU as well.

Stay tuned to find out more as I delve deeper into the workings of this device in the next few days.

As a final word, I would just like to say thank you to Josh and Butterfly labs, both from me and all of the MinePeon users that have been eagerly awaiting this device.

P.S. I will be releasing a new version of MinePeon in the next few days, the first fully ASIC tested release ever!

Bitcoin Valuation as a Fiat Hedge With Information and Substitution Effects

2013-05-14T10:04:00+12:00

About the author: John Vandivier is a graduate student at George Mason with formal credentials in policy, economics and political science. He also dabbles in philosophy and apologetics. His blog discusses all of the above at www.thegenerallifeblog.blogspot.com.*

In this article bitcoin is valued by predicting the approach of the market value of bitcoin to the intrinsic value of bitcoin as a fiat hedge over time according to the rate of information spread and including price dilution from substitution effects of alternative cryptocurrencies.

Chamath Palihapitiya is an intelligent and succesful venture capitalist who made a small error in thinking. While I trust his calculation of the world hedge value of gold to be about 9 T USD and agree that bitcoin can be used as such a hedge because of its decentralized nature, he failed to realize that many other cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin and Feathercoin have the ability to do the same thing. This substitution effect will dilute bitcoin's value.

Another error in thinking is one I don't think Chamath made, but one which many people who listened to his comments will have made. Bitcoin will not have a market price based on a value of 9 T anytime soon. This is because value as a fiat hedge is an intrinsic valuation not a market valuation.

As information spreads across a market bitcoin demand will increase and market value will approach intrinsic value. In the long run market value is equal to intrinsic value under free market theories which presume free and perfect information. Other than the long-run we must include information effects over time if we wish to accurately model the market value.

The specific details on the data used and methodology are available here. To summarize the results, it is predicted that bitcoin information will not be sufficiently spread through the global market before January 2019. In the mean time, other cryptocurrencies are diluting Bitcoin's share of the entire cryptocurrency market at a rate of about .7% per month. A good mid-term forecast would be for December 2013. This is late enough to avoid the short-term distortions we will notice from ASIC arrivals and Mt Gox's coming support of litecoin, yet early enough that we should minimize inaccuracy from extrapolation and divergence from current data.

According to projected spread of information and corresponding demand growth the cryptocurrency market should be worth 290 B in December 2013. After factoring in dilution from substitution the bitcoin market cap is projected to be worth 266 B. Finally, individual bitcoins will be further diluted by the additional bitcoins mined during that time, each of which comprises a share of the market value. Block 267000 will be mined in December and at that time each coin will be worth 2200 USD/Coin.

This forecast should not be considered reliable because it includes certain false assumptions. It is only exercise in theoretical valuation to be used alongside other valuation methods. This forecast can be improved in various ways including measurement the search to demand correlation and measuring the degree of substitutability of bitcoin for gold. This forecast assumes that anyone who knows about bitcoin will demand bitcoin and also that bitcoin is fully substitutable for gold, however both of these assumptions are demonstrably false in some cases. A person may want to hold both gold and bitcoin to diversify their risk. A person may search for bitcoin information and be lead to think it is undesirable.

Being statistically ignorant of these correction values we should expect them to each be 50%. Correcting for these values would give a more realistic expected December valuation of 550 USD/Coin.

**If you valued this article John would appreciate your support by way of comment, like, share or tip!**

**Litecoin** - LWghE5cAP3HKXNoXbfDSW6qUjCscJuPof4

**Bitcoin** - 1HT3ykSwHM6oHCjSvQVC9gwdXdHtWnjNkp

Last Forking Warning

2013-05-13T12:00:00+12:00

It has been just over two months since the bitcoin block chain was rocked by a near disastrous fork causing the bitcoin price to crash.

The culprit of the crash was found to be a bug that prevented pre version 0.7.1 bitcoin clients accepting large blocks that could be generated by version 8 clients. A temporary fix was put into place by Bitcoin Project lead developer Gavin Andresen that forced version 0.8 clients to generate blocks that version 0.7.1 could understand.

It is important to note though, the fix was a temporary one! In just under two days on the 15th of May (I have made a countdown timer above for your convenience) the fix will expire and version 0.8 clients will once again be able to make large blocks that older clients will not be able to understand.

This will lead to a hard fork where the newer clients and the older clients will disagree on the centralised blockchain.

It appears that most miners and pools have upgraded to version 0.8 clients already but it is yet unknown how many users are running older clients so this is the last opportunity for them to upgrade and avoid any issues.

Upgrading is only necessary of you run a pre version 0.8 copy of the official bitcoin client from bitcoin.org you can tell if you need to upgrade by opening your client and selecting the options Help => About Bitcoin. You should then see a window similar to the screen below, if your version number is anything below version 0.8 (the image below is version 0.8.1-beta ) you should immediately go to bitcoin.org and download and install the new client.

Since most (if not all) miners and pools have already upgraded it is unlikely that we will have an extended fork like we did back in March but there is a very real risk that individual users may experience issues.

International Block Erupter USB bitcoin ASIC in a group buy

2013-05-11T12:42:00+12:00

Ever since Friedcat from ASICMiner announced the new 300 MH/s Block Erupter USB devices I have been wondering how I can get my hands on some.

The terms of their sale is that you need to buy a minimum of 300 of the devices at 1.99 BTC each, that is an all up total of 597 BTC! While I do have a few bitcoin set aside for hardware I unfortunately don't have 597 and I certainly don't have 300 spare USB Ports. Fortunately BitcoinTalk came to the rescue for a lot of miners when a few users set up what is called "group buys". A group buy is a relatively simple idea where one miner collects funds (in the form of BTC) and buys from ASICMiner.

A few group buys where quickly set-up and started filling.

Forum user Arklan set one up for US/Canada users that quickly filled up and CanaryInTheMine also set one up,this time for US miners only (it is still open though). There are even a few efforts to get a group buy going in Europe.

Unfortunately this still leaves a good 80% of the world (including myself) out of luck.

So I have decided to do something I thought I would never do, I am volunteering to set up and perform a group buy for all of us that cannot take advantage of Arklan's or CanaryInTheMine's offer.

I set up a new server, got a SSL Certificate and started my own group buy. You can find my group buy at;-

https://satoshimine.com/

While the main propose for this is to get Block Erupter USB's into the International market it is open to all, even those outside North America and Europe. I have out of necessity had to price the devices at 2.6 BTC each to take into account all of the shipping, customs, insurance and various taxes but we are finally able to buy them.

The order system has been open for about 30 minutes now and there are already orders in the system waiting for confirmation.

Butterfly Labs forum under attack (Latter proved not to be true)

2013-05-03T09:59:00+12:00

Correction: Josh from Butterfly Labs has emailed me, there was no intrusion of any sort. They were testing some of their systems and adding new features.

While it did appear to be nefarious it seems that I jumped the gun, for that I apologize Josh assures me "everything is and has been secure."

The original post read;-

While pointing my browser at http://forums.butterflylabs.com/ I started to notice some strange things going on, namely that there were PHP errors being output at the top of the forum. While that in itself is not that unusual (I see it quite often when their database server gets overloaded due to the near constant DDOS that they receive) these were not your standard MySQL errors they are eval() errors.

[caption id="attachment_2208" align="alignright" width="1291"] Click to enlarge.[/caption]

For those of you who are not PHP programmers eval is used in php to execute arbitrary code on the server and improperly handled it is one of the largest security holes in PHP. Even the PHP manual warns about its use in no uncertain terms warning;-

Caution

The eval() language construct is very dangerous because it allows execution of arbitrary PHP code. Its use thus is discouraged. If you have carefully verified that there is no other option than to use this construct, pay special attention not to pass any user provided data into it without properly validating it beforehand. The PHP manual

My suspicions were mounting , but what I saw next confirmed it for me, a post from Butterfly Labs forum moderator BFL_Josh posted up a 20 MB password dictionary to the site, commonly used in brute force attacks.

#
# This is a list of 2,151,220 unique ASCII passwords in sorted order according
# to their native byte values using UNIX sort command.
# This list (also known as wordlist, password dictionary or password list)
# is useful for password recovery tools such as John the Ripper, Hashcat,
# Aircrack-ng and KisMAC. To use this file, be sure to first remove these
# comment lines, i.e. the lines starting with # character.
#
# If you are looking for a better password dictionary,
# see http://[removed].com/u[removed]/
#
# \$Revision: #11 \$
# \$DateTime: 2013/03/20 09:03:41 \$
#
# Comments/Questions? Send to [removed]@[removed].com
#
!
! love you
!!
!!!
!!!!!
!!!!!!
!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!Snippet of the uploaded password dictionary

My conclusion? Unless Josh has taken up a side career as a black hat hacker (and he always seemed like a pleasant guy to me) his account has been compromised and there is an attack on Butterfly Labs in progress.

I immediately sent an email to Butterfly Labs warning them of the penetration but my advice to you is to stay away for a while.

Butterfly Labs Shipping Update;- BFL Products Shipping Now

2013-05-02T09:43:00+12:00

Or at least that is what the mail says and since developers and reviewers have already been receiving 5 GH/s units it looks like we can believe it this time.

Hopeful miners have been reporting that they have been receiving email from Butterfly Labs asking them to telling them that their miners are about to ship and they need to give a final confirmation that they still wish to receive their ASIC bitcoin miners. It also gives the opportunity to cancel their order and receive a refund.

Unfortunately it seems that the Butterfly Labs website has gone down in a self inflicted DDOS as thousands of miners attempt to agree or disagree with the new terms. Please be patient with the website.

There already have been a few 5 GH/s ASIC bitcoin miners shipped to the developers of cgminer and bfgminer to ensure that the mining software will be ready as well as a few selected reviewers such as Dave from codinginmysleep.com and Butterfly Labs forum regular Grnbrg.

BFL_Josh even let slip to me that I might expect one in the post in order to get support ready for MinePeon.

I have included a copy of the email below if you did not get one.

Bitcoin Central hacked again

2013-04-25T12:54:00+12:00

The hacks continue, less than 24 Hours since the news that Slush's pool had been compromised Bitcoin Central's man page has been changed to one that reads "We have been compromised, please do not send any funds to your wallet."

This is not the first time Bitcoin Central has been attacked, earlier this month hackers also managed to gain access to their computers and compromise user accounts but according to Bitcoin Central at the time they managed to secure all of the funds. This time the wringing on the site reads "A few hundred BTC have been stolen, but the amount is small enough for us to cover it fully.".

[caption id="attachment_2179" align="aligncenter" width="330"] https://www.bitcoin-central.net/[/caption]

You may remember Bitcoin-Central from the news a few months back as the first bitcoin exchange to start down the road to banking legitimacy when they announced that they had partnered with Aqoba and Credit Mutuel to begin operations as Payments Service Provider (PSP).

Add these hacks to the near continuous DDOS attacks happening at MtGOX and Butterfly Labs it seems that bitcoin has gained enemies on the Internet.

Slush's bitcoin mining pool hacked

2013-04-24T19:43:00+12:00

It seems that hackers have decided to start to target bitcoin related services in earnest as the latest organisation to fall prey is the very popular Slush's bitcoin mining pool that usually resides at https://mining.bitcoin.cz/ .

Slush's pool is the oldest mining pool and it started with a forum post on November 28, 2010 when the pool operator (Slush) literally invented pool mining when he suggested that "Join poor CPU miners to one cluster and increase their chance to find a block!". While the suggestion was quite controversial at the time Slush wrote the first mining pool software (Called a "Cooperative miner" at the time) and the rest is history.

According to Slush he first noticed something was up when someone reset the password to his OVH Manager account at his hosting provider OVH.CO.UK Web Hosting Solutions.

What ensued was a short battle between the perpetrator and Slush resetting passwords in attempts to gain control of the pool. While Slush does not have any evidence yet he says "So far it looks like yet another inside job, like Linode two years ago. Or attackers found some shortcut how to gain access to Manager without confirming the request from the email.". Slush later goes on to say "For now I fully blame OVH for this issue."

Slush says he has now successfully managed to isolate and move the Stratum servers ( stratum.bitcoin.cz, stratum2.bitcoin.cz and stratum3.bitcoin.cz) to Amazon EC2 instances so as not to waste any hash power but as there is no safe database server the shares are not currently being recorded and Slush says "Because database isn't running and shares are not stored, I'll spread blocks mined during database outage to miners who'll continue mining on the pool since the database will be up again."

Slush also says that the mining pool will be back to normal operation soon after he fully migrates from OVH to Amazon EC2.

The first post on BitcoinTalk is available here or quoted below.

The pool has been hacked. Fortunately I noticed it fast enough, so I made database snapshot seconds before attackers overtake the database machine. I lost some amount of bitcoins, but I'll be able to recover it from my pocket. For now I'm evaluating what's next to do, because all machines in OVH has been compromised and they cannot be trusted anymore.

Full story:
Today at 3pm UTC I noticed that somebody succesfully resetted the password to OVH manager, the place where servers can be managed, restarted to rescue mode etc. I promptly resetted the password at OVH to something different and I also changed password on my email account and checked that there're no other active connections to my mailbox. I have to say that my mailbox is secured by OTP passwords and I take physical security very seriously, so nobody other had an access to my mailbox. I known that password-reset feature is quite popular attack vector, so I made everything possible to prevent it to happen.

By changing the password at OVH, all other sessions using the old credentials are automatically kicked from the Manager. I also cross-checked that nothing wrong happen to the servers at this time. Unfortunately I didn't find a way how the attackers got access to Manager, so I asked OVH support to provide some additional information and restrict Manager access to my IP range.

That's no surprise that OVH didn't respond to this ticket for hours, but at 11pm UTC I realized that there's another succesful password reset at OVH. This is complete mystery to me, because I'm aboslutely sure that nobody else had access to my mailbox and the email with reset link has been untouched (unread, not deleted). I'd say that attacker won't bother by changing status of the email to "unread", but he'd delete the email instead.

This time I realized that the attacker resetted the machine with the wallet to rescue mode, which means that I lost the control to this machine. I was still succesful by logging into the database and I took the snapshot of database and transferred it to safe location. Few seconds since the migration finished, attackers restarted all remaining machines to rescue mode.

So far it looks like yet another inside job, like Linode two years ago. Or attackers found some shortcut how to gain access to Manager without confirming the request from the email. I don't know what's worse option. I'll investigate this issue in detail later and I hope OVH won't close eyes to this.

I can recover the pool to the normal operation tomorrow.

Edit 01:38 UTC: Stratum servers are running on safe servers at Amazon. Mining works for now. I'll setup new database and webserver on trusted machines in few hours, so the pool will be back in full operation.Slush - BitcoinTalk

Butterfly Labs ship Jalapeños ASIC Bitcoin miners to customers

2013-04-23T20:56:00+12:00

The day has arrived, the Butterfly Labs forum Latest Update reads "Jalapeños are making their way to their new homes. http://ow.ly/i/1WUo4".

They have even provided us with a photo of a few of the ASIC bitcoin miners sitting on a trolley presumably waiting to be picked up and delivered to their new owners.

[caption id="attachment_2159" align="alignright" width="816"] Photo Provided by Butterfly Labs at http://ow.ly/i/1WUo4[/caption]

While there is no mention yet of numbers that have been shipped or when the other Butterfly Labs devices like the BitForce Single or Little Single will be shipping this will be welcome news to bitcoin miners everywhere.

Butterfly Labs was the first of the bitcoin manufacturers to announce that they will be upgrading their existing range of FPGA devices to ASIC early last year and started taking pre-orders on June 23rd last year, nearly 10 months ago. Since then they have had a series of technical and logistical problems in their quest to bringing ASIC devices to market.

Any sort of ASIC development is bound to be fraught with difficulty and there are still hurdles for Butterfly Labs to overcome before they get to full production of their entire line of devices. It has to be noted that so far two other ASIC contenders have already failed in their efforts (namely BTCFPGA and the short-lived Deepbit Reclaimer).

This also means that the bitcoin difficulty will be increasing at an even faster rate so while your new Jalapeño ASIC Bitcoin miner will currently earn you approximately 0.28 bitcoins a day (\$35.55 USD) at the current 8,974,296 difficulty you should make the most of it because that difficulty is unlikely to last long.

5 GH/s Butterfly Labs miner has been shipped

2013-04-21T14:11:00+12:00

Dave at the excellent bitcoin blog codinginmysleep.com has just received a developer version of the Butterfly Labs 5 GH/s miner and has done a very complete boxing video.

Enough from me, Dave's video is here;-

Go check out what Dave has to say on his blog, it sounds as if he will take a screwdriver to the thing to show us the insides some time soon.

I am jealous!

Ozcoin mining pool payouts suspended

2013-04-19T14:11:00+12:00

An announcement on BitcoinTalk by Ozcoin mining pool operator Graeme Tee says that they will be temporarily suspended while he works out a payment issue.

According to Graeme the problem originated when he made a mistake with calculating the PPS payout (Pay Per Share) for the pool. Apparently the last 50 PPS blocks earned a total of just under 1247 BTC but the pool actually paid out over 2071 BTC leaving a shortage of 824 BTC totally depleting the pools wallet.

Graeme is attempting to make up the shortfall out of his own funds but his personal 'stash' of bitcoin does not cover. He is in the process of either borrowing the addition funds or selling his own Avalon ASIC pre orders to cover the outstanding amount.

If you want to help Ozcion out of the situation Graeme has asked for you to use the Ozcoin mining pool (even though payments are currently suspended) to help generate income for the pool to cover as much as possible.

Graeme finishes up by saying "I apologize for this major hiccup but am doing my best to get these issues resolved as I think more pools closing is not good for Bitcoin."

Ozcoin is one of the oldest and most reputable bitcoin mining pools that started operation on the 7th of July 2011.

Hello Miners
I made a mistake:
A week ago I was getting concerned at the continued run of bad luck, I should have turned PPS off then.
Luck did not improve and after not sleeping well I got up at 3:00am to find we were on another long block and realized something needed to be done immediately.
The last 50 blocks on PPS
paid out 2071.11934723
earnt 1247.92580065
made up of
10 of last 50 payout less than 25btc
24 between 25btc and 50 btc
16 of last 50 payout more than 50btc
When the pool gets 25btc + a little transactions fees per block it is easy to see this is a problem.

Something that didn't help:
Miners moving from DGM to PPS when round went over 100% of Difficulty, I found \~40% of the pool was on PPS until share count passed difficulty then PPS lept to 80%+ of the pool - good for the miners, not so good for the pool. We initially coded payout method changes only be available at end of round but when PoT was introduced this changed - my fault for not making sure miners could not exploit this aspect of the pool.

About Payouts:
Payout have been stopped until we can code the payout script to take up where it left off when wallet empties.
Currently payout script starts at user 1 every time, if I top up wallet and payouts run the oldest members will get paid as usual, newer members wont be paid for some time.
Changing the code means we will roll through all users before starting back at user 1, the fairest way I can think of currently and hopefully will be complete within a few hours.

What I am doing:
I have put all of my personal coins into the pool and am trying to buy coins, another option I am exploring is borrowing 500-700BTc to be able to catch up on miners pay -not having a lot of luck with either yet, another option is to sell my batch2 Avalon preorder (seems people are paying up to \$50k for them - crazy I know)
I am also involved in other Bitcoin based businesses, any earnings of mine from these I will be putting into pool as available until pool is "back on it's feet" or loans repaid if I am able to secure one.

What miners can do to help:
Keep mining
Anyone that is able to wait a little longer for coins could remove payout address until pool funds are replenished allowing those more in need of payouts to be able to come to top of the queue quicker
Above all be patient, I am committed to paying all miners as soon as possible and continuing to improve the Ozcoin pool.

I apologize for this major hiccup but am doing my best to get these issues resolved as I think more pools closing is not good for Bitcoin.

Best wishes
GraemeGraeme - Ozcoin Pool operator

ASICMiner auctioning 10 of their 10 GH/s "Block Erupter blades"

2013-04-17T15:45:00+12:00

For some time ASICMiner has been promising to sell their ASIC bitcoin mining technology. Some possible products included the 300 MH/s USB mining dongle announced earlier this week.

Finally today, ASICMiner representative Friedcat has opened an auction thread on the bitcoin community site BitcoinTalk for people to enter bids for 10 "Block Erupter blades". Apparently the "Block Erupter blades" are the same devices that are being used by ASICMiner to power their own hashing farm currently rated at 7 TH/s.

Each of the "Block Erupter blades" is capable of mining at 10 GH/s and can be over-clocked to 12.829 GH/s using proper cooling meaning that ASICMiners own farm consists of somewhere between 550 to 700 of these devices. The devices also each run independently of a computer using a 12 volt 10 amp power supply (8.3 Watts per Giga Hash draw).

If you want to put in a bid you will need to be quick though as auction lasts for roughly 72 hours and ends at April 19, 09:00:00 PM forum time and the post has been replied to over 100 times already (most containing bids) and has been read over 2200 times.

At the time that this article is posted the current highest bit is for 5 of the boards at 33.5 BTC each or 177 BTC for 50 GH/s making these devices the highest bitcoin per GH/s available. The probable reason for the high price though is that these devices will be shipped immediately upon payment instead months away for Avalon ASIC devices and the yet to be released Butterfly Labs devices.

Avalon batch two starts to ship, over 51% of the network hashrate soon to be Avalon

2013-04-16T09:47:00+12:00

According to their most recent mail out Avalon has started shipping their second batch of 65 GH/s ASIC bitcoin miners to waiting customers that have paid the 75 BTC asking price.

The second batch of ASIC miners consists of 600 units (or 39 TH/s) to add to the already hashing 300 units of batch one (19.5 TH/s). That is a total of 900 Avalon ASIC Bitcoin miners combining for a total of 58.5 TH/s.

Given that the total bitcoin network hashrate, including the 300 Avalon units already in operation is somewhere about 60 TH/s this means that Avalon ASIC units could soon be responsible for close to half of the network hashrate.

While this does not mean the same thing as if a single entity was in control of over 51% of the network it does bring into question what a malicious piece of firmware along with a trojan complete with firmware updater could potentially do to the bitcoin network.

ASICMiner meanwhile are still sitting at 7.2 TH/s and Butterfly Labs ASIC devices are yet to make an appearance.

Below is a copy of the full email from Avalon;-

We are ramping up and the shipping of batch two has indeed begun, albeit not up to speed, we expect this situation to improve in a week or so once the equipment finish installing and the new, additional crew get use to the process. we are in also the process of merging many earlier problematic orders, if your order still does not show up in the store by Friday of the 19th please open another ticket.

Those who wish to trade in your FPGA generation Icarus or Lancelot: it is time to package and RMA those units back to us.

The address to sent

Mr. Chen Xuyi

Xin Zhong Fa Dian Zi Shi Chang, 2319#

Zhong Guan Cun Da Jie 32 Beijing Hai Dian

China

100086

or in chinese

陈旭宜

新中发电子市场，2319#

北京海淀区中关村大街32号

+86 13801156072

> > State on the Box this is a Icarus/Lancelot RMA, in the box include > your contact information (name, email is a must!), once received we'll > get in touch with you. > >

> >

> > On to [chip sales which has been > updated](http://avalon-asic.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=238a9ecd2e5192e3cd3ace26d&id;=58b015bc12&e;=a144babd58). > >

> >

> > Due to overwhelming demand, we are going to gauge interest on a > smaller 2 module version of the Avalon unit that's effectively half of > a Avalon original in size, and greater than 45Gh/s in performance. > >

> >

> > As per usual the price of the unit is determined by the following > equation. > >

> >

> > mining\_difficulty \* ( 1 + number\_of\_month\_in\_lead\_time) over a > 30 day period on the unit's hashing power. to those interested, here > is the > form [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1rJJniFiYn0XMPZVKVni86xBvSTylWw0fv1c1zAfuR68/viewform](http://avalon-asic.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=238a9ecd2e5192e3cd3ace26d&id;=9bbeb772d4&e;=a144babd58) > >

> >

> > p.s. [here's a picture of our new > case.](http://avalon-asic.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=238a9ecd2e5192e3cd3ace26d&id;=f1a178d58b&e;=a144babd58) > >

> > Avalon Email List

ASICMiner to release USB ASIC bitcoin mining devices

2013-04-13T10:56:00+12:00

ASICMiners latest update by representative Friedcat has created a bit of a stir in the bitcoin community, it seems that they will be releasing USB ASIC bitcoin miner devices sometime in the future.

Pictured to the right is the "not-yet-assembled" 300 MH/s mock-up that ASICMiner is proposing to start shipping to customers worldwide. As of yet there is no mention of how much they will actually cost or when they might be available.

ASICMiner was the second organisation to deliver ASIC power to the bitcoin network when they closely followed the first few Avalon ASIC bitcoin miners by a few days. Their monster bitcoin mining farm started work at BTC Guild on February 13 at 800 MH/s and quickly grew to their current 7 TH/s under the pseudonym user 67117.

The move according to Fiedcat is one that will hopefully promote network security by distributing the network hash power while still maintaining a good rate of return for ASICMiner shareholders. At present, ASICMiners chosen pool BTC Guild has had to resort to unusual measures to limit their own hash rate in order to keep from gaining more that 51% of bitcoin computational power (leading to the possibility of a 51% attack).

Meanwhile the competition Avalon ASIC are expected to open their "Batch 3" for orders sometime soon and Butterfly Labs are yet to ship anything.

MtGox halts trading

2013-04-12T08:53:00+12:00

Due to the large amounts of issues at MtGox caused by the recent influx of new traders to bitcoin MtGox has announced that they have suspended trading for 12 hours in order to clear the backlog and let things calm down.

The fill update (quoted below) halted trading at \$124.90 USD per bitcoin after falling from \$266 in less than 24 hours.

Meanwhile the second largest bitcoin exchange BTC-E is wildly fluctuating around the \$50 to \$60 dollar mark.

There has been wide spread talk and speculation in the bitcoin community that the centralisation of MtGox as 'the place to go' to trade bitcoin may end up as a problem, this seems to confirm peoples fears.

The MTGox exchange will open again at 11 AM JST or 2am GMT, 10 pm EDT, 7 pm PDT.

Mt.Gox Support
posted this on Apr 11 23:33

Orders will not be accepted for the moment as we need to upgrade our database to accommodate the trading volume. However, you may still cancel your pending and open orders. Trading will resume at 11.00 am JST. Our apologies for the inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.MtGox Support

Pre Bitcoin Fork warning, Upgrade your bitcoind clients now

2013-04-09T09:40:00+12:00

In less than a months time the fix put into place to prevent a fork like the one on the 11th of March will no longer be in place and miners will again be able to make large blocks that will be rejected by version 0.7.2 bitcoind software or earlier.

The fix, put into place on the 18th of March when Gavin Andresen released Bitcoin-QT and bitcoind version 0.8.1 made it so that all blocks made were compatible with older versions of the software will expire on the 15th of May so it is imperative that if you run bitcoind downloaded from the official website you upgrade to 0.8.1 as soon as possible (before May the 15th at the very latest).

Do I need to upgrade?

This only affects people running the full bitcoin reference client downloaded from the official bitcoin.org website as pictured to the right. You can check what version you are running by selecting 'Help' and then 'About Bitcoin' from the menu, if the first lite reads anything else but "Bitcoin version v0.8.1-beta"
you need to upgrade.

If you are running an alternative client such as MultiBit, Bitcoin Wallet or Electrum this does not affect you.

How do I upgrade?

Either go to the official bitcoin.org website and download it from their or click here to download it directly from sourceforge.

Once you have downloaded it, run the setup file and follow the installation prompts.

What happens if I don't upgrade?

It is quite likely that if you do not upgrade that in the near future a block will be generated that you bitcoin client cannot process. If that is the case you will no longer be able to download future blocks and your client will stop being able to process the block chain.

You will effectively be stuck at that point and in order to progress you need to upgrade your client.

What's the worse that can happen?

If there are miners using the older version of bitcoind there is a possibility of another fork. Fortunately it seems that all major pools have upgraded though and if there is a fork it will be ignored and those blocks (and rewards) on the fork will become worthless.

It is unlikely that bitcoin will revert the older block size like it did last time so everyone needs to upgrade their clients.

Is there another way to make my pre 0.8.1 bitcoin client compatible?

Yes, if for some reason you cannot upgrade to 0.8.1 you can follow these instructions from the bitcoin.org website;-

If you cannot upgrade to the latest version, you can still avoid the problem. Create a file called DB_CONFIG in the bitcoin data directory, containing these two lines:

set_lg_dir database
set_lk_max_locks 120000

BTC Guild voluntarily limits their hash rate

2013-04-06T13:18:00+13:00

BTC Guild who has been climbing in hash power ever since ASICMiner unleashed their monster 6,898.84 GH/s ASIC bitcoin mining farm have voluntarily decided to limits their own hash rate hash rate.

After having a very lucky day for the pool that netted 30% more blocks than expected at their given hash rate BTC Guild pool operator Eleuthria commented on BitcoinTalk that "A lot of noise in the IRC, reddit, and forum yesterday related to "BTC Guild dangerously close to 51%" due to a large amount of luck yesterday.".

The concern is that if any one person or organisation were to gain 51% of the network hashing power they would be able to perform a 51% attack if they were so inclined.

The plan is to limit new users registering on the pool and failing that to disable the getwork protocol on the pool to limit users hash rate. Past that Eleuthria says there is very little he can do apart from encouraging users to use a different pool.

The full plan as laid down by Eleuthria is as follows;-

If Pool Speed is Over 40% of Network

BTC Guild will begin limiting the creation of new accounts. They will not be completely closed, but it will be throttled heavily. If speed continues to grow past 40%, the limit will be lowered steadily. I'm working on the system to implement these limits right now, and it will be ready by Monday April 8th, though I don't believe it would require activating that soon.

If Pool Speed is Over 45% of Network

BTC Guild will remove all getwork based pool servers within 24 hours. This is expected to reduce the pool by about 3.5 TH/s, or roughly 15% as of this post.

If Pool Speed is Over 45% of Network After Getwork is Removed

At this point there is very little I can do other than push notices on the website urging users to consider other pools, since the speed would be entirely based on old users expanding their hash rate faster than the rest of the network.Eleuthria - BTC Guild operator

While it is unlikely that BTC Guild would perform a 51% attack it is important for the bitcoin network security that no one actually reaches it.

Butterfly Labs increases prices and decreases hash rates on the ASIC bitcoin mining devices

2013-04-05T08:39:00+13:00

UPDATED: Response from Butterfly labs at the bottom.

After the bad news last week that Butterfly Labs missed their power estimates for the new range of BitForce SC ASIC bitcoin miners and the under performing glance Luke-Jr showed us of an actual device hashing Butterfly Labs has shocked the bitcoin mining industry by altering their entire product line.

The BitForce Jalapeno that was to do 4.5 GH/s and cost \$149.00 will be replaced with a 5 GH/S Bitcoin Miner for \$274.00.

The BitForce Little Single 30 GH/s Miner for \$649.00 will now be a 25 GH/S Bitcoin Miner costing \$1,249.00.

Finally The BitForce Single 60 GH/s for \$1,299.00 is replaced with 50 GH/S Bitcoin Miner for \$2,499.00.

Unfortunately the BitForce Mini Rig for 1,500 costing \$29,899.00 is now marked as out of stock and has no replacement at present.

I have not been able to find out what will happen to people with 'pre-orders' as of yet (some going back a full eight months) but when I find out, I will update this article.

UPDATE: A person that I am in contact with has received a response to an email from Butterfly Labs and has kindly allowed me to re-post it here.

First the enquiry;-

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 3:43 PM, \<zzzz@xxxx.com> wrote:

Dear BFL, I ordered the 60GH model and paid through wire transfer MTS-TRN 00000000-000000 in the amount of \$1333.00 as stated under my account with email zzzz@xxxx.com.

My question: Please tell me I will receive the 60GH model for the price that was paid as I see you have changed your pricing model and I am almost down to my last couple of dollars but risked it all with your company.

Thank you in advance for your help in this matter.

To summarize: I just would like clarification that I will receive the 60GH that I ordered. Before the price/model change a few days ago I spoke with Dave on the phone he said they will ship sometime in June.

THANK YOU!!

And now the response;-

From: Butterfly Labs Inc \<office@butterflylabs.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: New mail from contact form
To: zzzz@xxxx.com
Everyone will receive the gh/s rate within 10% of their stated hash rates that they paid for.

If you do not have a paid preorder number for the previous products, and you want more hashing power you will need to place a preorder for the new models.

Thank you,

ZZZZZ

Names, email address and transaction codes of individuals have been altered.

Bitcoin-Central and Instawallet Hacked

2013-04-04T10:18:00+13:00

As the price for bitcoin soars to new heights it seems that it has gained some unwanted attention.

It seems that the black hat fraternity has decided that the time was right to hack a slew of affiliated sites including Bitcoin-Central, Instawallet and Paytunia bringing all sites offline, permanently in the case of Instawallet.

Bitcoin-Central reports that all 41,854.5915 BTC of customer funds (some \$5,315,951.67 USD at today's rates) is stored in bitcoin address 1LrPYjto3hsLzWJNstghuwdrQXB96KbrCy and is fully under control by them. They also report that "Due to the recent and important price fluctuations we will cancel some outstanding orders before reopening. For example if the average price stays above 100 EUR/BTC we will cancel all asks below 110 EUR/BTC. No trades will be reversed."

Bitcoin-Central is expecting to have their services back up and running within 48 hours and have promised to give 24 hours notice before going live. Instawallet however has been permanently compromised and is closing.

If you have bitcoins with Instawallet the outline of a recovery plan that will be announced sometime in the near future is below;-

For the first 90 days we will accept claims for individual Instawallets. Your wallet's URL and key will be used to pre-populate a form to file the claim.
After 90 days, if no other claim has been received for the same url, your Instawallet balance under 50 BTC will be refunded. If several claims have been filed for the same url, we will process those claims on a case by case basis, under the presumption that the claim we received first belongs to the legitimate balance holder.
Claims for wallets that hold a balance greater than 50 BTC will be processed on a case by case and best efforts basis.

At the moment it is unknown how much or if any bitcoins have been stolen from Instawallet.

Avalon Europe site confirmed, its not Avalon ASIC

2013-04-03T21:44:00+13:00

If you keep a close eye on bitcoin and bitcoin related sites as I do, you may have noticed that Avalon ASIC seem to have opened a new branch in Europe to sell their bitcoin ASIC mining devices.

The site ( http://www.bitcoinavalon.com/ go there at your own risk, I have included a screenshot to the right if you want to view it) looks quite official using the same basic CSS and HTML as the official site but under further inspection has several errors and broken links.

I am glad to confirm that according to Avalon ASIC themselves (via a brief email update contained below) that this is not Avalon ASIC, or even remotely associated with Avalon ASIC it seems.

Dear neil@mineforeman.com,

http://www.bitcoinavalon.com
is NOT an official Avalon ASIC site.

We've gotten several emails asking for confirmation and here it is.info@avalon-asic.com

Luke-Jr shows off the first Butterly Labs ASIC bitcoin miner

2013-04-02T20:20:00+13:00

Luke-Jr developer of the popular BFGMiner bitcoin mining software has spent a bit of time at Butterfly Labs headquarters working on driver support for their new ASIC bitcoin mining devices and has released photos today on BitcoinTalk showing us photos of what he says is a prototype Butterfly Labs Little Single ASIC hashing.

If you look at the image above it shows two ASIC bitcoin mining devices on the left and one of them seems to be plugged in and running, above that you will see a power meter showing that there are 179 watts being used. The laptop is running BFGMiner running one Butterfly Labs device at what looks to be somewhere around 23 to 24 GH/s.

While those are not the specifications for the Little Single (originally meant to be 30 GH/s at 30 watts) this is just a prototype that Luke-JR is using to perfect mining software support for BFGMiner.

Another image to the right is a close up of the ASIC board in operation with the USB cable to the bottom right and the red power lead just above that.

This preview of a working device from Butterfly Labs will be welcome news to the multitude of people who have ordered ASIC devices from Butterfly Labs, some orders have waited for over eight months now.

As a final note the post was made on April 01, 2013 at 06:36:32 PM so while Luke-Jr seems to be earnest in his statements it could turn out to be one of the cruelest April Fools joke in bitcoins short history.

Bitcoin makes it into space.

2013-04-01T13:58:00+13:00

One of the things I like to do is keep the MineForeman's live overview in Google Analytics's open so I can get a feeling about what is going on, what stories are popular and where my readers are from.

As I was doing some work on minepeon I happened to glance up and see something out of the norm, it appeared that the main site was being accessed from the computers aboard the International Space Station!

I have included below a few screen shots from the activity to record the event for posterity.

I wonder if they have a full bitcoin client up there along with a copy of the block chain. First a picture of the live map;-

Finally, a screen dump of what pages they are reading;-

Butterfly Labs March 28th Update there are power issues

2013-03-29T18:55:00+13:00

After what seems like an eternity of silence the latest update from Butterfly Labs is not good. BFL_Josh reveals in the update that both the power requirements and hashing rate of the new bitcoin ASIC miners are not what they expected, and not in a good way.

It seems that they may ship the bitcoin ASIC miner with either decreased hash rate or increased power requirement. In the post Butterfly Labs may release a revised bitcoin ASIC miner some time in the future that meets the original specifications at a later date.

It seems that the bounty of 1000 BTC that Butterfly Labs offered to donate to charity if they miss their power requirements is going to have to be paid.

More details are appearing in the ButterflyLabs forum Shout Box, I will try to update the information here as it becomes available.

No mention of a shipping date yet.

Below is the full update from BFL_Josh.

I had wanted to post a video tonight, but wasn't able to make that happen, so let me apologize for that in advance. As some of you may know from the chatbox, we have been working diligently to get these ASICs out the door. We've been tracking down a power issue these last few days and have it isolated to a few key systems. In the interest of time, we are planning on potentially scaling back units hashing speed as required to accommodate the extra power and shipping multiple units to those that want their units right now. If would would prefer to wait for a unit after we've made some changes to the systems that need a bit of tweaking, we will be happy to put your shipment on hold. However, if you'd rather have the units right now at an increased power usage, we will ship you as many units as required to get you to the hashrate your purchased, if we end up having to scale back any given class of unit to fit within the power envelope of the current board design.

We have the current design hashing, and as I said, I had hoped to have a video of a unit hashing here in KC, but I wasn't able to bring that all together tonight, but hopefully I can get it posted up tomorrow or by this weekend. I will update as soon as I have more news to share, with a video.

If you absolutely do not want a unit that is consuming more power than expected, you can let us know you'd like to wait for a revised unit or you are welcome to request a refund. If you'd rather have your units shipped regardless of increased power usage, we will still guarantee your hashrate by shipping you however many units are required to achieve your purchased hashrate. There is no need to contact us right now if you are not concerned about the power usage and just want your units shipped ASAP. Even with the increased power demand on these first units, they will still out perform any competing products by a very wide margin in terms of power and megahash/J.

Again, we apologize for the delay, but we are almost there.BFL_Josh Butterfly Labs

Avalon ASIC update - Batch Three may be used to mine for Avalon

2013-03-25T17:39:00+13:00

[]If you had been wondering what Avalon where up to with their line of ASIC devices you would not be alone.

If you had subscribed to their mailing list though you will find that your have received an update, for those who are not subscribed though the update is below.

To summarise, Batch One is all but complete, Batch Two should start shipping on the 15th of April.

Batch Three however is somewhat in question, they seem to be unsure if they are going to go ahead with selling the units or using them to mine for themselves. They say that this is open for discussion though and have asked you to use the FAQ section of their site.

Batch one have mostly finished shipping, aside from a small number of orders with incomplete/wrong address or phone numbers. We've been getting these orders back from our shipper and getting in touch with people to update their information, this is a fairly quick process. If you have not gotten your order, especially people in Germany or Iceland that uses special characters in their addresses. I highly suggest you open a ticket with our support indicating your order number, full address with phone numbers, so if there is a problem we can pull up new information quickly and let shipping proceed. This also applies to batch two customers, please make sure your phone number is correct, and there is no typo in the address.

Speaking of batch two, we are unfortunately going to be late. This should not be too surprising as the delay from batch one will no doubt carry over. This delay also caused us to make drastic adjustments to our project timeline dealing with anything with a lead time like parts purchasing. We plan to start shipping majority of batch two orders starting on 15th of April. Not all the news is bad news however, originally around this period we are suppose to take this time to organize, make some changes and install a brand new SMT line in our facility. This upgrade will effectively double our production capacity, it enable us to put Avalon into the hands of our customer even faster. The new line is currently scheduled to come online during the last week of April. We expect batch two and three to ship much faster than batch one mainly there is no Chinese New Year and we have overcome the problems encountered in shipping batch one.

On to batch three, we at Avalon did not even wish to sell another batch. If you recall, our original plan was to produce only one batch, sell chips to thwart the centralization of mining, but due to the lackluster performance of our competitors we are here today as the exact centralization we tried to decouple. In addition, this delay is eating into our timeline for this project's future goals and various other projects. To be frank: it was a simple decision of build a mining farm ourselves and mine for a month or so to get the funding for things like the SMT line and next generation development vs. raise the price and sell units trying to get the money earlier to counterbalance the delay we have had. So, we came up with some terms and left the choice to the community.

More details on the F.A.Q. section of the Site. There will also be a follow up newsletter on chips for sale and the trade-in program.

Decide on 8:30AM EST, 3/25/2013.

info@avalon-asic.com

Bitcoin BIP 34 Survival Guide

2013-03-24T10:53:00+13:00

This was covered a few days ago, but with the disruption of a hard fork so fresh in our minds I though it pertinent to bring up again. Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik even though it important enough to post to BitcoinTalk to add to a post made earlier this week by bitcoin lead developer Gavin Andresen.

According to the current data all major mining pools have upgraded to at least bitcoind 0.7.2 and BIP 34 is about to be fully implemented any time new, certainly within the next few days.

This will mainly affect miners, but everyone needs to be aware of the implications especially since it is a soft fork event.

What is happening?

BIP 34 (the BIP stands for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) was proposed by Gavin Andresen and accepted back in July 201, BIP 34 adds block height to the coinbase. This fixes a problem that might occur if another transaction was generated in the coinbase with a duplicate hash, making the earlier coinbase transaction un-spendable.

There are two stages to BIP 34, the first stage has already been been reached when 75% of new blocks generated and a check went into place making sure that the new version 2 blocks were valid.

The next stage is about to happen any time now. Stage 2 will happen when 950 of the last 1,000 blocks (or 95%) and all older version 1 blocks will be rejected and orphaned from the chain and a soft fork will happen.

What should I do?

If you are running any version of bitcoind earlier than 7.2 upgrade immediately to 0.8.1. Even if you are running 7.2 it would be best if you upgraded to the latest bitcoind 0.8.1 in order to avoid another fork on the 15th of may.

If you are not running bitcoind and using another client to manage your bitcoin you do not need to do anything.

What could happen?

If you are mining with a bitcoind version not compatible with BIP 34 or your pool does not support BIP 34 any blocks you mine will be immediately orphaned and you will not receive the reward.

If a sufficient amount of miners and pools do not upgrade there is a potential for a full fork that would lead those miners and pools down a block chain that had no rewards.

What should happen?

If everyone (miners, pools, and users) who runs the full bitcoin client upgrades this soft fork will go into place and just continue on the original block chain.

Update: Fixes from Jeff about what BIP 34 fixed.

Orphaned blocks from May the 11th to be paid

2013-03-23T13:36:00+13:00

Gavin Andresen bitcoin lead developer, Bitcoin Foundatation member and person behind the closed Bitcoin Faucst has made a post on BitcoinTalk saying "I decided a good use of Bitcoin Faucet funds would be compensating miners who had blocks that were orphaned in last week's Bit Chain Fork."

This is a very generous move by Gavin, under the normal rules of bitcoin if you generate a block that is orphaned for any reason the bitcoin reward (currently 25 BTC) is in the orphaned block and never makes its way into the block chain.

There were 31 blocks orphaned in the May Fork totalling for a total of 775 BTC in rewards that were orphaned. Pay per share pools like BTC Guild who pay even if blocks were orphaned took quite a hit in the fork and will be very happy, and grateful for Gavin's generosity.

Gavin later goes on to stress that "This is a one-time thing-- don't expect orphaned blocks in the future to be compensated!" so dont expect your orphaned blocks to be paied in the future.

Gavin's full post on BitcoinTalk is below.

After talking with a few groups of people, I decided a good use of Bitcoin Faucet funds would be compensating miners who had blocks that were orphaned in last week's Bit Chain Fork.

This is a one-time thing-- don't expect orphaned blocks in the future to be compensated! It is just a coincidence that I haven't had time to fix the Faucet, and have a bunch of coins waiting to be given away.

Transaction id paying the to the addresses in the coinbases of the orphaned blocks: c931f1aa9f0d211dca085342ec472e77b538b55980a2c7b0ff9fab9a20a9acd2Gavin Andresen

Butterfly Labs re-open their Web Order System

2013-03-20T11:38:00+13:00

Butterfly Labs has re-opened a feature that we managed to get a brief (unintentional) preview of last month. This time they have done it on purpose though.

In a blog post customer support representative BFL_Jody does warn though that "there are still a few orders that we are working on to make them show up as they should." and asks users to contact her if their are any problems.

If you would like to check your order you can now to to their products page and login using the email address that you used to place your order on their products page.

I can verify that I have logged into the system and seen all of the orders that I expected and I have talked to a few other customers of Butterfly Labs that report to be able to see their orders as well. I will warn you though , Butterfly Labs have been under a DDOS attack recently though so if you have problems, wait and try again.

Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the DDOS attacks.

BFL_Jody's full blog post is quoted below.

The Order System Open--Mostly

We have mostly opened the order system so people can go in and look at their orders and can also reorder. I say "mostly" because there are still a few orders that we are working on to make them show up as they should. If you can't see your orders or if they don't seem correct to you, please let us know. Yours may be one that is still being imported or corrected, but you can check with us to see.BFL_Jody - Butterfly Labs

Version 1 bitcoin blocks will soon be orphaned.

2013-03-19T11:58:00+13:00

Bitcoin lead developer Gavin Andresen has made a post on BitcoinTalk to bring users attention that the threshold of blocks that are version 2 and comply with BIP 34 is about to be reached and version 1 blocks could soon be considered invalid and orphaned from the chain.

BIP 34 was accepted into the official bitcoin client close to a year ago last July in order to further standardise the process under which block creation rules were updated and has been sitting dormant until 75% of the blocks created were compliant with the new version 2 standard. Once the 75% threshold is reached then additional checks went into place to ensure that the blocks were indeed version 2 compliment.

According to recent data, of the last 1,000 blocks 821 were version 2 compliant with BIP 34 so the next threshold of 95%, or 950 blocks in 1,000 is imminent.

Under the draft, and the rules already in the bitcoin client once the 95% threshold is reached it hits the point of no return and from that point on 100% of the blocks created must comply with BIP 34 or be rejected as orphans causing a soft fork.

All previous versions of bitcoind have had the BIP 34 changes back ported to them so as long as you have updated since the middle of last year you should be safe, just to be sure though, you may wish to go to http://bitcoin.org/ and download the latest version of 0.8.1 released today.

I have included Gavin's post on BitcoinTalk below;-

Last July, BIP 34 was accepted. It specifies a "soft fork":

Quote

If 950 of the last 1,000 blocks are version 2 or greater, reject all version 1 blocks

We are getting close to that threshold: 821 out of the latest 1000 blocks were version 2.

If you are mining in a pool: there is a list of pools and what versions they are producing here. If your pool is producting version=1 blocks, you should urge your pool operator to upgrade or patch.

If you are mining with p2pool or solo and using a very old version of bitcoind: you should upgrade, or you risk your blocks getting orphaned.Gavin Andresen - Bitcoin lead developer

PrimeAsic client feels he has been scammed.

2013-03-18T21:33:00+13:00

Since PrimeAsic first announced that they were in possession of 80 GH/s ready to ship and for sale at € 1,249.00 back on March the 4th the bitcoin community has treated them with a great deal of scepticism.

In the official announcement thread on BitcoinTalk by Jr. Member and forum donator PrimeAsic the thread has been full of user investigations in order to attempt to verify, one way or another the validity of PrimeAsic's claims. Some users went as far to travel to Hungary to the supposed offices of PrimeAsic in the attempt to meet the owners, and possibly even see the 80 GH/s miners in operation.

I myself even mounted an investigation from New Zealand to see if I could shed some light on the matter. Unfortunately try as I might I could not gather any evidence either way.

Today though, BitcoinTalk newbie Kayel has reported back withnews in a post that we have may have suspected, but none have been able to confirm, in his post he reports "I can confirm for all, it is a 100% complete scam".

Kayel, it should be noted is a newbie and not normally able to post in the "Custom hardware" section of BitcoinTalk must have received permission from the forum moderators goes on to say "Of course I did consider this could be a scam prior to my order, but I took a gamble".

In a way Kayel (who I suspect is an established BitcoinTalk member posting under a pseudonym to avoid embarrassment) has done all bitcoin members a favour going the extra mile to uncover PrimeAsic's claims.

I have included Kayel's full post below for reference.

Well, I have been procrastinating this post because I was slightly embarrassed to admit I did place a order early on in this ruse.

Someone from the Gmail "primeasic@gmail.com" account acknowledged receipt of my order, and stated I would be receiving a shipping confirmation on Monday May 11 2013. Of course, no email was received. A few days later I sent a inquiry and of course I did not get a response. Nothing has been heard since. Of course I did consider this could be a scam prior to my order, but I took a gamble.

I can confirm for all, it is a 100% complete scam. Everyone who did the previous due diligence was correct; there are no ASIC's here.

Oh well, a fool and his precious btc were parted. Thank you community for all your skepticism. Feel free to point and laugh at me now. Kayel - BitcoinTalk

Post fork plan. Upgrade your bitcoind client to 0.8.1 by 15th of May.

2013-03-17T18:25:00+13:00

After last weeks fork the bitcoin development team are taking proactive steps to ensure that the problem will not happen again while still being able to push forward with the 0.8 series of updates and upgrades to the bitcoin system and network and have released their official plan.

What's the plan?

The plan is a simple one, a new version called 0.8.1 of the official reference client will be released tomorrow that has all of the improvements of the 0.8 line with the important addition of a routine that will check to make sure that any block created is compatible with previous clients temporary preventing any forks similar to the one we saw last week.

When 0.8.1 is released tomorrow it is recommended that everyone including the miners upgrade as soon as possible.

At the same time messages will be sent through the bitcoin network to all users running pre 0.8 clients asking them to upgrade to 0.8.1 by the 15th of May 2013 referring them to a page on the official bitcoin webpage (the page has already been created, you can see it at http://bitcoin.org/may15.html).

Additional messages will also be sent out on the 15th of April and 8th of May if you still have not upgraded once again asking the user to upgrade to 0.8.1 as soon as possible.

Finally on the 15th of May the routine that checks that new blocks are backwards compatible with pre 0.8 versions of the client will be disabled allowing blocks to be created up to a size of 1 MB at the discretion of the miners.

What do I do?

If you are running a full bitcoind client for whatever reason when the new binary become available tomorrow at http://bitcoin.org/ download, install them and then forget about it, your job is done.

What happens if I don't upgrade?

This is one of my favourite things about bitcoin, if you disagree with the changes (for whatever reasons) you are free to continue running pre 0.8 clients.

There is a caveat to that though, the bitcoin network runs on a consensus, by running a version of bitcoind of a different version with different rules to block creation you are voting to keep the older rules for block creation. If enough people and miners share your opinion that the old block rules are better sometime after the 15th of May a new hard fork will be created and we will have two valid blockchains, one that the 0.8 people follow and one that the pre 0.8 people will follow.

It is most likely at this moment though the concencus seems to be to upgrade and the pre 0.8 chain will never come into existence, so if you don't upgrade it is unlikely that you will be able to use the bitcoin network until you do.

I have included below the announcement on the Bitcoin-Development list.

Here's the plan for the 0.8.1 release:

A new CheckBlock() rule, in effect until 15 May, that ensure only
blocks compatible with old releases are accepted into the main chain
(only blocks that touch 4,500 or fewer distinct txids are allowed).

A limit of 500k to blocks created, also in effect until 15 May.

Alerts will be sent to pre-0.8 releases over the next two months,
telling people to either upgrade or create a DB_CONFIG file so they
can handle large blocks.

Code is : https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2373

I chose May 15 arbitrarily; two months seems like a reasonable 'quick'
amount of time to give people to upgrade/workaround.

The fix was written to be trivial to port to previous versions, and to
be as simple as possible.

Some of the exact details may still change before the 0.8.1 release
(e.g. it might not be exactly 4,500 distinct txids).

Schedule:

0.8.1 binaries late tomorrow or Monday. An expires-after-24-hours
Alert sent on Tuesday to everybody running pre-0.8, pointing to
http://bitcoin.org/may15.html

Another 24-hour Alert sent on April 15, reminding everybody again they
will need to upgrade or workaround.

A final Alert that never expires sent on May 8th.

After May 15, miners will be free to create blocks up to 1MB, and
anybody running old versions who ignored the alerts may be left
behind.
Gavin Andresen [Bitcoin-development] list

What the Fork was that? A forking post mortem.

2013-03-14T14:00:00+13:00

As many of you already know there was a 'hiccup' in the bitcoin network this week. It caused a flurry of articles, some good, some panicked and others that were outright alarmist.

To be honest, while I was aware of the issue as it transpired it did not register with me as much of threat. To me it was just a temporary problem, one that we have seen before and undoubtedly will see again. While it was slightly unusual that there had to be any sort of human interaction, it was far from an unexpected event and had been planned for well in advance.

What Happened?

The technical description to what happened is an unintentional Hard Fork. I have detailed the blocks and times in a simple graphic (to the right) if you want to follow it more closely as I go into what happened.

A hard fork occurs when there are a sufficient number of bitcoin clients on the network that disagree on the rules about how blocks are created and recorded in the universal block chain and it leads to a split in the chain, one set of bitcoin clients follow one split in the chain and another set follows another split in the chain.

When talking about bitcoin we call these splits a fork, the analogy is that it is like a fork in the road that one group follows the right fork and another follows the left fork. In theory there can be more than one split in the chain to follow leading to multiple forks, but that did not happen in this instance.

This particular fork occurred because version 0.7.2 and version 0.8 bitcoind (the bitcoin reference client) differed slightly in how they thought a block should be built. Version 0.8 though that blocks should be allowed to be a certain size and version 0.7.2 disagreed.

When bitcoind version 0.8 was released nearly a month ago on the 19th of February the intention was for all miners to replace their older version 0.7.2 clients (released 14th of December 2012). Intentions being what they are though, it seems that many did not. There are a variety of reasons not to upgrade but this set the stage for what was about to happen.

If you wanted to point a finger of blame at something, you would be firmly pointing your finger at this version of Block 225430 mined by Slush's pool that was mined at 10:46:35 PM on the 11th of March, 2013 (all block times are in UTC). All in all it is not an unusual block except for the fact that it was rather large, 974.6865234375 KB to be exact.

If you were like me and weren't watching the bitcoin protocol using a 0.7.2 client at the time you would have missed what happened next. If you were like me, and watching with a version 0.8 client you would have seen what I saw, block 225430 was mined and added to the block chain on top of block 225429, followed by block 225431 at 10:46 pm then block 225432 at 10:56 pm and so on.

However if you were watching with a version 0.7.2 client you would have seen block 225429 at 9:33 pm and then a block 225430 at 10:39 that was rejected because it was too large. In fact, you would have seen this new block 225430 rejected several times as other 0.8 clients insisted that it was valid but your 0.7.2 client would continue rejecting it (and subsequent blocks that were based off that block) because it was just too big as far as 0.7.2 was concerned.

This could (and some could argue should) have gone on for ever effectively forcing people to upgrade to version 0.8 in order to be able to continue to use and validate the block chain, but that is not what happened, what happened next was a hard fork.

1 hour and 9 minutes after the last valid block for 0.7.2 (block 225429) a new version of block 225430 was mined and reported to the network by the IP address 46.250.25.35 creating a new version of the chain (or a fork) that could be followed by version 0.7.2 clients, meanwhile version 0.8 clients had already mined another few blocks (all the way to block 225535).

A fight then ensued between the 0.7.2 clients and the 0.8 clients each reporting that they had the valid block chain, 0.7.2 insisted that 0.8's version of block 225430 was invalid and 0.8 insisted that its chain was valid and longer than 0.7.2's version so it was the main chain.

Who did it affect?

Most would not have noticed the problem if it weren't for the considerable press coverage, in the end it was only miners (solo, or the pool that they belong to) and merchants that were affected.

Miners were affected because there were apparently two valid chains to work on and depending on the client that they were running they could be working on either the 0.7.2 or 0.8 version of the chain and any block rewards would only be valid in that version of the chain.

Merchants were probably the most affected, in effect they for a short amount of time were running with two general ledgers and any particular transaction might of shown up in either version, possibly neither or even both!

What should I have done?

Unless you are a solo miner or a bitcoin merchant the safest and proper action you should have taken is nothing. It did not matter if you were running 0.8 or 0.7.2, in fact it does not matter even now (but you should probably upgrade when 0.8.1 comes out, not because of the fork, just because upgrading your software is a good thing to do).

If you were a solo miner on the other hand you should have downgraded to version 0.7.2 just for the mean time.

If you were a merchant you would have been well served by following MtGox's lead of suspending all transactions until the problem was resolved.

How was it fixed?

Truth be told, sooner or later it would have fixed itself as people with 0.7.2 clients realised they that they were not getting the latest blocks on their chain and upgraded to 0.8 but that may have taken days (or possibly even weeks).

What ended up happening is The Bitcoin Project lead by Gavin Andresen released a post asking all miners to downgrade their bitcoin software to 0.7.2 effectively killing the 0.8 chain because the 0.7.2 chain would not accept the fork block 225430.

Alternatively Gavin could of asked everyone to upgrade to 0.8.0 and bitcoin would have just continued to run with the new chain including the large block at 225430.

Did anyone lose anything?

Yes. Not directly through the fork itself though, but because of the panic that arose. It could have been coincidental but there was a large sell off in bitcoin about the same time that the fork was discovered.

The value quickly recovered after the problem was properly identified and it ended up being less than a 5% drop, but for the person/persons who did the sell off (it amounted to about 25% of bitcoins value) they would have unfortunately taken quite a loss in the panic.

Will it happen again?

Yes, in fact it already has.

There are two versions of blocks 225564, 225637, 22575, 225830 and 225853 already, these are what we call soft forks or forks that solve themselves without any interaction from us. They are caused by two separate miners solving the same block at or about the same time. The bitcoin network resolves these block conflicts by choosing the block that is the largest and then continuing the chain using that block. The other block not chosen is then called an orphan block and is removed from the network automatically.

What have we learned?

While this hard fork was unintentional it has been a useful lesson. Sooner or later we are going to want to do this on purpose to change the way the bitcoin network works and that will require a hard fork. There are many reasons that we will want to do this, just to name a few off the top of my head that have been talked about recently are:

Make the block size smaller so a the full chain does not take as much hard drive space
Make the block size larger to enable more transactions per block (and less fees)
Increase the decimal point in bitcoin from 8 places (changing the smallest denomination from 0.00000001 to something like 0.00000000000001)

There are more reasons for a hard fork, and some reasons that have not even been imagined yet but they are all valid in their own way and would require us all to agree to do a hard fork.

We have also learned not to panic (yeah right).

Conclusion.

While I don't want to lessen the importance of this event, it was serious, it did require intervention and it did impact on the price of bitcoin. I would also like to point out that it was a good test run for bitcoin, sooner or later it had to happen, and later we may force it to happen ourselves.

Butterfly Labs: BFL_Josh has the chips in hand, Send in your FPGA Trade-ins

2013-03-13T12:04:00+13:00

BFL_Jody the customer service representative from Butterfly Labs has made a blog post asking people who have pre-orders with trade-ins to please start sending their FPGA bitcoin miners back to Butterfly Labs for processing adding "With Josh's return today with chips in hand, I feel comfortable with talking about trade-ins."

Jody has offered a few ways to proceed for people with FPGA trad-ins for their new ASIC devices;-

First (and most obvious) send tour FPGA devices back to their new address ( Butterfly Labs, Inc., 10770 El Monte, Suite 101, Leawood, KS 66211)
Second, pay a deposit for your old FPGA devices of 20 BTC for a single and 500 BTC for a Mini Rig and keep mining with your FPGA devices until your ASIC devices arrive and only then shipping back your FPGA devices. On arrival of your FPGA devices Butterfly Labs will refund your deposit.
Third, Butterfly Labs will hold back part of your ASIC order until your FPGA devices arrive back at Butterfly Labs.

After many months of waiting and hoping it finally seems that Butterfly Labs is on the final stretch in the race to bring ASIC bitcoin miners to the public and I know a lot of people in the community will be relieved to know that the wait may soon be over, even though Butterfly Labs seem to have come in last.

The full open letter to customers is contained below.

Dear FPGA Upgrade Customer,

We are nearly ready to begin shipping and we want to give you time to arrange your trade-in so you won't lose any time getting into ASIC mining. We are putting forth 3 ways to help you get your miner as quickly as possible.

1. The first way to satisfy your trade-in is to simply mail the unit back with your Single Upgrade order number for the order or orders you wish your trade-in to apply to. Of course, also include your name and address in the package. Please send back your power supply and cables. If you are an international customer mark your package as "returned goods" or whatever conveys this status. When we receive your unit or units we will mark your order as ready to ship. Mail all miners to Butterfly Labs, Inc., 10770 El Monte, Suite 101, Leawood, KS 66211. We cannot be responsible for miners mailed to our old address.

2. The second method is to send us a deposit of 20 BTC for each Single Upgrade and 500 BTC for a MiniRig Upgrade. We will hold these BTC until your FPGA's arrive at our facility, thus allowing you to mine with your old units until you receive the new ones. This deposit is not an exchange for dollars. It is a BTC deposit that will be returned whole to you. If you want to pay a deposit email us at BTCdeposit@butterflylabs.com and we will send you a wallet address so that we can receive your coins. When your FPGA arrives at our facility we will return your coins within 3 business days. You will also mail your FPGA miners to the address given above.

3. The third way you can make a Single Upgrade ready to ship is to ask us to hold a later shipment as collateral. To do this you tell us what later paid order number you want us to hold until we receive your miner. For example, if you have ordered a Single Upgrade on June 23 and a Little Single on August 5, we will put a HOLD on the August 5 miner until your FPGA is returned for your June 23 order. If we start shipping the August 5 orders and your FPGA still has not been received, the HOLD will not allow u to ship that unit. The HOLD will be released as soon as your FPGA is received. You must email us at hold@butterflylabs.comand tell us on which order number you want the HOLD placed. We will only hold orders for Singles or Little Singles as collateral for a Single Upgrades. A MiniRig order must be placed on hold for a MiniRig Upgrade order to ship. When we receive your FPGA we will lift the HOLD on your order within 3 business days. You will also mail your trade-ins to the address above.

Thank you for your cooperation and patience in this endeavor.

Jody
Customer Service
BF Labs, IncJody - Butterfly Labs Customer Service

Butterfly Labs: Photos of ASIC chips on boards

2013-03-12T14:38:00+13:00

BFL_Josh and the team over at Butterfly Labs seem to be hard at work, and while they have not made a update post yet they have posted photos of ASIC chips on their PCB Boards.

First is a picture of the unpopulated board with no components or ASIC chips.

Next, we see a picture of the compleated board with 1 ASIC chip that will be a 4.5 GH/s Bitcoin Miner (BitForce Jalapeno).

Now a complete board with 4 ASIC chips that will soon be a 30 GH/s Bitcoin Miner (BitForce Little Single SC)

And finally we see a fully populated board with 8 ASIC chips that will be used both in the 60 GH/s Bitcoin Miner (BitForce Single SC) and the 1,500 GH/s Bitcoin Miner (BitForce Mini Rig SC).

The release of these photos may herald the imminent news that Butterfly Labs will finally start to ship their ASIC bitcoin miners. The new cannot come fast enough for the people that have had pre-orders with butterfly labs for close to nine months now.

The next hurdle for Butterfly Labs after shipping will be how fast they can ramp up production and fulfil nine months of back orders.

Butterfly Labs update: The chips are at the packers

2013-03-08T11:30:00+13:00

BFL_Josh has a short but positive update for us today, the chips are at the packers.

According to the post they should be done sometime today or tomorrow before they are shipped back to Butterfly Labs for final assembly.

While the actual post is very light on any information this means that the bumping must be finished and that the assembly is the only stop necessary to complete before they finally ship and we see our ASIC bitcoin miners on our desks.

I have included the post below for reference;-

The chips are the packaging facility and being packaged. I don't currently have any further updates beyond that at this point. They should be done sometime today or tomorrow, but that is, of course, subject to change. I will update when I have further information.BFL_Josh - 7 March 2013 Update

If Butterfly Labs do indeed manage to ship it is uncertain of how much they have on pre-order and how long it will take them to clear the backlog, so even if your order today it may take even more months for them to deliver your unit depending on their production capabilities.

Another ASIC manufacturer enters the bitcoin mining device market.

2013-03-04T22:41:00+13:00

UPDATE: Please read this article.

AUTHORS NOTE: Please read the comments at the end, as of yet no one in the bitcoin community has been able to verify PrimeAsic's devices.

AUTHORS WARNING: It has now been in excess of a week since the PrimeAsic announcement and despite repeated attempts to contract them by myself and other members of the bitcoin community we have yet to receive any sort of correspondence apart from their bank account details. At present I would advise EXTREME CAUTION in dealing with PrimeAsic and would like to invite them to contact me directly (my contact page has all my details) if they would like to arrange an independent verification of their claims.

If it is proved to be true another manufacturer has entered the ASIC bitcoin mining device arena. According to a post made today on BitcoinTalk by a forum member called PrimeAsic they have just become another device supplier and they already have their devices built and in stock.

The post (quoted below) does not include the cost of the new devices (see the update at the end) but according to PrimeAsic the units will be capable of 80 GH/s each and they are currently using them to mine at Ozcoin. That possibly explains the high hash user that appeared a few weeks ago.

Hello Everyone!

I'm posting to announce our ASIC product, PrimeAsic which does up to 80Ghash/s using a little over 800W power.

We are a Hungary based company, started developing this project in 2012 June, finished it without ANY pre-order money at all.
Now the units are ready to ship, or to be picked up locally.

Our webpage is currently being developed as I post here, please give us a day so it will be fully finished.
Domains owned by us: bitasic.com, btcasic.com, 80gigahash.com, primeasic.com
All other names are not owned by us, and are possible scam attempts to misuse our name.

I will constantly post with pictures of the miner equipment, specifications, prices, company details and if requested the registration certificate, phone number, address for local pickup and I will try to respond to every questions you may have.

And at last, here is a proof of it mining:

[]

[]

You can go to ozco.in pool, check the user top 20 and see us there:)
Mining will be stopped after our page comes live.

Stay tuned for more info!primeasic

While they have no website or logo yet they have provided us with a few screen shots contained below of the miner in operation at Ozcoin.

PrimeASIC is from Hungry making this the first European ASIC hardware manufacturer and they apparently managed to do all of their development without taking a single pre order.

UPDATE: Their web site says that the devices will be selling for €1249.

UPDATE2: I have been having trouble contacting PrimeAsic but will continue trying. Several other people have also told me that they are having no luck.

More Avalon ASIC miners delivered

2013-03-04T20:50:00+13:00

While details are still somewhat sketchy it seems that another 3 Avalon ASIC bitcoin miners have been delivered.

BitcoinTalk user libertybuck posted the picture below in the Avalon Update thread showing his three new units being unpacked. It finally seems that the disruptions caused to shipping by Chinese New Year are finally over and you might be expecting your unit any day now.

If you assume that he is already hashing with these units, each of them will produce approximately 66 GH/s, for a total of 198 GH/s. At today's difficulty of 4,367,876 that means he will be generating 22.7976 bitcoins a day or \$776.94 US Dollars.

With 900 confirmed orders between batch one and batch two of Avalon's shipping plan that is a total of just under 60 TH/s capacity that Avalon is preparing to send out, dwarfing ASICMiners current 4 TH/s and more than doubling the current bitcoin network capacity to over 90 TH/s.

At that point though many GPU miners may finally turn their rigs off.

The latest news from Butterfly Labs is that they may be shipping somewhere close to the 9th of March.

ASICMiner pays dividends

2013-03-01T08:59:00+13:00

ASICMiner representative Friedcat announced on BitcoinTalk that the first dividend from their monster ASIC bitcoin mining farm has been paid.

In the post (quoted at the end for posterity) Friedcat says that the total dividend for this, the first week of operation is 3860.41091438 BTC, or approximately \$131,253 US Dollars at today's rate.

BitcoinTalk forum staff member DiabloD3 goes on to confirm in a post that the dividend has been paid saying;-

I can confirm 32.279 BTC on 1371 sharesDiabloD3

DiabloD3's post also confirms that there are just over 163,964 shares in the ASICIMiner mining operation and that the dividend per share was approximately 0.02354413 bitcoins.

This is not Friedcat's regular Thursday update so more is to follow.

Pre-Update

First week's dividends paid. Total sum 3860.41091438. This is all mining revenue minus the paid urgent debts and reserves.

I cannot hold myself from some sleep. We will explain the status of our project, how we are going to improve the deploying speed for the second batch, and give a public brief financial information after that. If I could get up before Feb 28. 11:59:59 PM forum time it will still be a Thursday update.Friedcat - bitcointalk

Butterfly Labs test Wafer pictures and new chip details

2013-02-28T08:48:00+13:00

After yesterdays news that the bumping process is taking longer that expected BFL_Josh from Butterfly Labs has a few photos of what is meant to be the test wafer now at the ASIC testing plant getting ready to be cut.

The plan is to sacrifice one of the wafers that were included in batch one pictured below that contains 1000 of the 6000 ASIC chips that were supposed to be in batch one.

While the pictures of the wafers are very generic and could be of anything, Josh does let slip a few more details of the actual design of the chips in the caption of the photos where he says;-

Delicious wafer pie!

This is the test wafer containing approximately 1000 BFL designed 65nm hand routed double round SHA256 chips. Each chip contains 16 engines and measures approximately 7.5mm x 7.5mm. BFL_Josh

Josh also posted another photo of the wafer that I must admit looks a bit like bathroom tiles.

Butterfly Labs Update: Bumping still not finished

2013-02-26T16:58:00+13:00

BFL_Josh has posted another update about Butterfly Labs progress. Unfortunately the update is that they are still waiting on the bumping facility to ship their chips.

Josh seems very aware that this update will be a disappointment to most and admits "Since Friday we have been, in a word, agonizing over how to make up for lost time.".

All phases of Butterfly Labs production has been held up due to this delay, in particular the Chip Foundry is waiting on a confirmation and testing of the first batch of new ASICs before they start work on the second batch.

In order to mitigate as much of the problem caused by bumping as possible Butterfly Labs have announced that they are going to use one of the six wafers that were produced in batch one for testing. This will decrease the maximum amount of chips from the first batch from 6000 to 5000 but it will enable, if successful, the Foundry to start working on Batch 2.

Josh finishes up promising more updates soon with;-

The ASIC team has promised me pictures of the wafer tomorrow, Tuesday the 26th. As soon as I get those, I will be posting them. As soon as I hear something with regards to the chip testing, I will be posting that as well. If I'm not posting an update, it's because there's nothing new to report. BFL_Josh - Butterfly Labs

Review: AmazonBitcoins.com - Good, but no SSL yet

2013-02-26T15:10:00+13:00

I don't often do reviews but recently I have looked around for a few SD cards for the MinePeon project. In particular some people on the Butterfly Labs forum have been trouble installing MinePeon onto a 4 GB SD card, even though it was built on a 4 GB card. The solution is obvious though, get a 2 GB card and build MinePeon on that.

I was aware that AmazonBitcoins.com had launched, and Brian, one of the owner/operators was nice enough to donate a bitcoin to the MinePeon project so I could check out their new service. I am all for supporting start-ups in the bitcoin community, the more ways we have to trade in bitcoin the better if you ask me.

The first thing I do before using a new service is to check a few facts, most importantly I check the domain whois data and SSL certificate.

     Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC
     (http://www.godaddy.com)
     Domain Name: AMAZONBITCOINS.COM
        Created on: 09-Feb-13
        Expires on: 09-Feb-14
        Last Updated on: 09-Feb-13
     Registrant:
     ItemGrab
     2330 se 14th st
     Ocala, Florida 34471
     United States

As you can see, the whois data returned ans I would expect, names, addresses and phone numbers. Too often I have gone to sites and found obviously fake data or worse, 'protected' data.

Next I looked for a SSL Certificate, the site does not default to SSL so I simply put https://amazonbitcoins.com/ into my browsers URL bar. Unfortunately I got the dreaded .

After a few checks, I determined that the SSL certificate is actually valid, but not for amazonbitcoins.com, it is a wild card certificate for cloud hosting company Heroku. It is certainly something that they can improve on. Since the data I will be transmitting is my MineForeman email address (neil@mineforeman.com) and new password.

I also contacted Brian about this, and he assured me that a SSL certificate is on its way so by the time you get around to using AmazonBitcoins.com you should not have to worry about it.

The actual usage of the site was very smooth and quite quick, by the time that I got back to my computer after making and eating my dinner I had an email in my inbox containing the Amazon Gift Code. I took screen shots of the process, but the entire process can be set down in three lines of text so I am going to do that instead;-

1. Login/Register.

2. Send Coins to provided bitcoin address.

3. Receive Amazon Gift Code via email and the Web Site.

After that, I just went to Amazon, entered the gift code and ordered the SD cards for the MinePeon project.

Conclusion:

Overall, I am impressed with the look and feel of the site, my transaction went though smoothly and once there were confirmations I received my gift certificate.

Overall, I will be using AmazonBitcoins.com again. It gives me an excellent place to go if I need to buy more hardware with the money donated to the MinePeon project.

DISCLAMER: I am not affiliated with AmazonBitcoins.com in any way. Additionally, as I mentioned in the article Brian from AmazonBitcoins.com donated 1 BTC to the MinePeon project and that is the funds that I used to buy the SD Cards at Amazon.

ASICMiner now at 4,569.28 GH/s

2013-02-25T09:19:00+13:00

ASICMiner is continuing to set records on the BTC Guild Hall of Fame as they now reach 4,569.28 GH/s or 4.5 TH/s.

At the current difficulty ASICMiner should now be netting approximately 620 bitcoin a day, or \$18,600 USD. If you look at it as a monthly figure it is just over half a million US Dollars and their deployment is only one-third of the way through their proposed 12 TH/s goal.

It is becoming clear that when ASICMiner finally deploys the rest of their ASIC bitcoin mining equipment, reported to be just under 3 times what they have currently deployed they will control approximately 30% of the total bitcoin network with very little resistance from the opposition.

Meanwhile and announcement is expected any day now from Butterfly Labs that their chips have arrived back from the bumping facility allowing them to proceed into production, and there is now at least 3 Avalon ASIC bitcoin devices now mining.

This has left ASICMiner the clear leader in the ASIC bitcoin mining race.

Kanoi from the cgminer crew posts photos of his Butterfly Labs visit

2013-02-20T22:33:00+13:00

Even though they may be last to ship in the ASIC race, Butterfly Labs is certainly geared up to start production.

As you may be aware cgminer developer Kanoi is currently on an expenses paid trip to the offices of Butterfly Labs, Kansas City in the United States. While there he is meant to be working on cgminer support for the new BitForce SC ASIC miners that are due to ship any day now once the chips get back from the bumping facility (it is when they literally put a bump of solder on the chip packaging in order to attach it to a Printed Circuit Board).

In a post on BitcoinTalk cgminer lead developer ckolivas made a post showing off some of Kanoi's photos of the inside of Butterfly Labs production facility, you can see the photo's here;-

http://198.245.60.111/Pix/ .

I asked ckolivas and apparently Kanoi does not mind them being reposted so here are a few that I am sure everyone has been waiting for.

First the Pick And Place Machine

Next the Flow Machiene

The Obligatory Boxes of Fans

And finally what looks like Final Assembly

With both Avalon and ASICMiner currently starting to deploy or ship their ASIC bitcoin miners Butterfly Labs have catching up to do, but the certainly seem to be prepared.

Another Avalon ASIC Bitcoin miner has been delivered

2013-02-20T09:50:00+13:00

After weeks of waiting another Avalon ASIC bitcoin mining device has been delivered, now there are a total of three Avalon ASIC Miners units in operation. The other two are the one delivered to Jeff Garzik and another that was delivered to The Bitcoin Foundation.

This seems to confirm the rumours that a unit had been delivered to someone in China, the user is called Fatpan and he posts pictures of the unit as it arrived on a Chinese Forum (Google translate may help you with that link).

From the pictures, contained below it seems that this unit has arrived in kit set form.

Hopefully this means that the disruptions caused by Chinese New Year are over and other units may begin making their way to users desktops.

Even with the recent difficulty increase to 3,651,012 it is going to take just days for this unit to pay for itself and start making a return.

CORRECTION: It was not delivered like that, Fatpan just took it apart to see what made it tick.

Another high giga hash user joins the bitcoin network

2013-02-19T08:34:00+13:00

In a similar event that happened at the beginning at the week with a 800 GH/s user at BTC Guild that later turned into the monstrous 3 TH/s user 67717, now known to be ASICMiner. There is now another user that has joined the ozcoin pool and started hashing at 500 - 6oo GH/s.

Current speculation in the community at bitcointalk is that it is another deployment from ASCIMiner coming online.

If you go over to the Ozcoin Hall of Fame (the user top 20 seems down at the moment) you will see an anonymous user currently sitting at 550,906 GH/s or just over half a TH/s.

While it has yet to be confirmed it seems that ASICMiner may have decided to spread their hashing power, believed to be somewhere around 12 TH/s across multiple pools in an effort to spread the load of their hashing or even belay people fears of a 51% attack in progress.

UPDATE: I got a screen shot of the top 20 using firefox;-

Bitcoin network hash power soaring to new record

2013-02-17T14:04:00+13:00

It has been less than a week since user 67117 started bitcoin mining at BTC Guild at 800 GH/s . It was no surprise when it was later revealed to be ASICMiner bringing their new ASIC bitcoin miners on-line.

What has come as a bit of a surprise (at least to me) is how fast they are managing to deploy their farm, in the past 4 days their hash power has steadily grown from the original 0.8 TH/s to the current 2.7 TH/s. That is an increase of 330%.

If you look at the graph below provided by http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ you will see that it adds up to a new record for the bitcoin network at just under 30 TH/s.

[caption id="attachment_1683" align="alignright" width="720"] Bitcoin Network Hashrate from http://bitcoin.sipa.be/[/caption]

The increase of hashing power is more than ASICMiners 2.8 TH/s though, so it seems that the with current MtGox price at \$26.88 USD it has encouraged some miners to turn their GPU rigs back on. The next difficulty change is due change in the next 24 to 48 hours from 3,275,465 to somewhere close to 3,600,000 though, so don't expect those GPU's to stay on for long.

Meanwhile the competition is lagging behind or nowhere to be seen. Butterfly Labs are yet so send out a single ASIC and Avalon's total devices in the hands of miners is still two despite having started shipping just under a month ago.

Reddit Gold now accepts bitcoin

2013-02-15T16:29:00+13:00

3 months ago, around the time that Wordpress added bitcoin support Reddit CEO Yishan Wong revealed that they are considering Bitcoin as a payment method. Yishan even started a thread in /r/bitcoin to gauge interest.

Months have passed since then and apart from the redditor built Reddit Bitcoin Bot there has been no further news, but today that changes.

In a post to /r/bitcoin Yishan has announced that you will now be able to buy your Reddit Gold with bitcoin.

Yishan does warn though;-

Next, I do want to set some expectations: despite its considerable potential, Bitcoin is still very new, experimental, and no one really knows what will happen with it and what people will do with it. It is this way with all new technologies. This means that there is the possibility that unexpected or bad things happen, and we may have to modify or suspend our implementation of Bitcoin support if that happens. We think that adding Bitcoin support is very worthwhile, but having worked in the online payments industry for awhile for a player (PayPal) which in its early years hoped greatly to reform and revolutionize the global money system, I know that things can be complicated and not always turn out the way you intend them. I hope things go well, and so I ask the Bitcoin supporters here to help us make that happen. I believe that adding Bitcoin support to reddit will help it gain a fair bit of press, and spark more widespread discussion and understanding about it.Reddit CEO Yishan Wong

So it seems that if you want to keep bitcoin support in Reddit, you better use it.

67117 identity revealed, it's ASICMiner now at 2 TH/s

2013-02-15T09:23:00+13:00

In a post on BitcoinTalk Friedcat has just confirmed what we have all been suspecting and the 800 GH/s that we first saw a few days ago that has subsequently grown to over 2 TH/s is indeed ASCIMiner starting to deploy their bitcoin ASIC mining farm.

It does not end there though as Friedcat's says in his post (quoted below) this 2 TH/s is only the beginning of the ASICMiner deployment. While we do not actually know how much hashing power ASCIMiners bitcoin mining devices will eventually peak at, it is estimated that it could be somewhere close to the current bitcoin network capacity.

Pre Update

The deploying is in process. We are stress testing on btcguild with a portion of our devices. The current computation power is close to 2TH/s.

We have been working day and night and still are. The real update will be given in a few hours.Friedcat

With the competition Butterfly Labs still not shipping their ASIC miners and Avalon only shipping very limited numbers it opens the network to the possibility of a 51% attack if ASICMiner where so inclined.

800 Giga Hash per second user just started mining at BTCGuild

2013-02-13T12:31:00+13:00

There has been no official confirmation on who it is yet, but if you head over to BTCGuild and check on their Hall Of Fame page you will see a user, called 67117 that is mining at a ground breaking 800 to 900 GH/s (or 800,000,000,000 to 900,000,000,000 Hash's per second, or .8 to .9 TH/s if you prefer).

This represents nearly one fifth of BTCGuild current hashing capacity and nearly one twentieth of the total capacity of the bitcoin network

There is a lot of speculation by the community on BitcoinTalk in the ASICMiner thread that the rack ASIC bitcoin mining devices that we saw pictures of earlier this week have finally found their way onto the network, but as I say, no confirmation yet.

It does seem though, the time of bitcoin ASIC has finally arrived, even though it is only for a few Avalon ASIC owners and whoever this user 67117 is.

It is probably summed up by BTCGuild operator Eleuthria who earlier said in a discussion on #btcguild;-

. now we have a single user with 800gh? 0_0
\ Yes.
\ Welcome to the future.Eleuthria

UPDATE: By the way, whoever user 67117 is they will be generating about 122.83 bitcoins a day at the rate of 800 GH/s, or \$3,000 US Dollars at today's rates.

UPDATE2: It is indeed ASICMiner.

Butterfly Labs offer discount to a future order if you have a pre-order older than 6 months

2013-02-12T19:03:00+13:00

After increasing pressure on their own forums Butterfly Labs representative BFL_Josh has announced that they are planning on sending out vouchers to people that have pre-ordered over six months ago.

Under the plan, pre-orders in the first month (June 23rd - July 24th) will receive a one-off voucher for a 25% discount of a future order and pre-orders in the second month (July 25th - August 25th) will receive a 10% discount.

BFL_Josh does point out though, there are some conditions, the voucher is only usable once, and it is only up to the value of the original order.

I have some good news with regards to the vouchers.

First months orders will get 25% off a future order. (Order dates June 23rd - July 24th)
Second months orders will get 10% off a future order. (Order dates July 25th - August 25th)

The 25% and 10% apply up to the value of your original order(s).

Example 1: Original first month order for \$1000 worth of equipment, next order for \$1500 worth of equipment, get \$250 off the order.
Example 2: Original second month order for \$1000 worth of equipment, next order for \$500 worth of equipment, get \$50 off the order.

We are doing it this way to prevent abuse such as someone ordering a Jalapeno, then getting 25% off the next order and ordering a Mini Rig.

The codes will be one time use only, and they will not be transferable.BFL_Josh

It is yet to be seen if this goes far enough to satisfy some of the more disgruntled customers who claim that they "could have bought 3 times the amount of power if i had waited and not pre-ordered".

BTCFPGA Oops - Website offline.

2013-02-12T08:47:00+13:00

The website for BTCFPGAs ASIC offerings (http://bitcoinasic.net/) has been taken down today after weeks of controversy involving strange forum posts, guaranteed shipping dates, claims of hacking, Asian Buyers, Buyers from Iraq and finally claims of fraud from the same Iraqi buyers.

The WhoIs data (contained below) says that the domain is till valid, but the site is being re-directed to a Securepay page saying "This site is currently unavailable.". Further more it goes on to ask the site owner to ring a GoDaddy support number.

Perhaps this will finally be the end of this story, but with hundreds of bASIC pre-orders apparently still outstanding I doubt it.

 Query:    bitcoinasic.net 
Registry: whois.godaddy.com
Results: bitcoinasic.net = [ 50.63.102.251 ]

     Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC
(http://www.godaddy.com)
     Domain Name: BITCOINASIC.NET
        Created on: 08-Oct-12
        Expires on: 08-Oct-14
        Last Updated on: 08-Oct-12
     Registrant:
     Domains By Proxy, LLC
     DomainsByProxy.com
     14747 N Northsight Blvd Suite 111, PMB 309
     Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
     United States
     Administrative Contact:
        Private, Registration 
BITCOINASIC.NET@domainsbyproxy.com
        Domains By Proxy, LLC
        DomainsByProxy.com
        14747 N Northsight Blvd Suite 111, PMB 309
        Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
        United States
        (480) 624-2599      Fax -- (480) 624-2598
     Technical Contact:
        Private, Registration 
BITCOINASIC.NET@domainsbyproxy.com
        Domains By Proxy, LLC
        DomainsByProxy.com
        14747 N Northsight Blvd Suite 111, PMB 309
        Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
        United States
        (480) 624-2599      Fax -- (480) 624-2598
     Domain servers in listed order:
        PDNS01.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
        PDNS02.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
     See Business Registration Listing
     Copy and paste the link below to view additional details:

 Results brought to you by the WP Whois Proxy  1.3.3;
http://wp-whois-proxy.sf.net
 Based on the GeekTools.com proxy
 Server results may be copyrighted and are used subject to the
terms and conditions of the Server

Raw WhoIs Data

New ASICMiner rack pictures

2013-02-08T19:02:00+13:00

Friedcat has made his weekly update post on BitcoinTalk and I must confess, I think they are very close to deploying their ASICMiner ASIC bitcoin mining devices. While it is still unknown exactly how much hashing power they are about to unleash on the bitcoin network form the second image below, it seems that it will be a lot.

There is still no news on when or where you will be able to buy and sell shares in their bitcoin hashing farm but ASICMiner has promised that before the first dividend they will have a suitable trading platform.

Meanwhile the competition have not been idle, there have been two Avalon ASIC bitcoin devices confirmed live and hashing on the bitcoin network, one belonging to Jeff Garzik and another that was delivered to the Bitcoin Foundation. There are also unconfirmed rumours of a third belonging to an unknown Chinese national.

Butterfly Labs are now expecting to ship sometime in the week of the 17th of February according to their latest update.

New page to check your order at Butterfly Labs

2013-02-08T17:09:00+13:00

If you have orders at Butterfly Labs you can now check on it's status using their new on-line ordering system.

As forum regular Lab_Rat points out in a post though, it is still in the process of being implemented so don't flip out if your order has not been loaded yet.

To check your order go to the products sub domain of the Butterfly Labs website, http://products.butterflylabs.com/ and click on the Log In link at the very top right of the page. Once the login page is loaded you will see the traditional email address and password input boxes for your account.

Don't worry, if you don't remember your password, you have not set one yet, no one has but you can quite easily use the forgotten password link under the login box to get the new system to email you a password reset link.

Be warned though, it is obviously not finished and I can spot an order I made that is not there yet so don't panic, we may have to wait for a bit longer for all orders to show up.

UPDATE: Looks like they removed the links and re-directed everything back to their products page.

Butterfly Labs shipping pushed back

2013-02-06T20:00:00+13:00

BFL_Josh has updated the BFL ASIC Status thread and with the ship date only 4 days away the expected shipping date has been pushed back.

This time according to the post the date has only been pushed back to the "17th for shipping, probably a bit later in the week unless the bumping house really pulls it together, we might be able to ship as early at the 18th, but that is pretty optimistic, more likely is around the 22nd or so."

CAN Electric call BTCFPGA new ASICs fraud

2013-02-06T18:45:00+13:00

After the recent announcement on the BTCFPGA site that the production of their new ASIC mining devices were to be taken over by CAN ELECTRIC I thought I would investigate further.

Apart from the story being a very strange one that I had posted about, I had a vested interest. I run a bitcoin mining co-operative and it is my job (due diligence even) to keep myself informed so that I can properly advise the co-op members.

]({filename}/images/2013/02/BTCFPGA-CANELECTRIC.png)I decided that I will send them an email to find out more, so I went to the contact area at the website, only to be faced with an contact form (pictured right). On a personal note, I dislike contact forums. They have their place, but that place is on a page that includes email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses. The contact form should just be there for the convenience of the visitor.

I decided that I wanted to do a bit better than some anonymous contact box so I entered can electric into Google and very promptly found their main contact page including an email address.

Just to be sure though I compared the physical address included on both contact pages to make sure they were the same, they were indeed in the same country, city, block, building and even office number (again, pictured to the right).

Even the phone number was similar, one ending in a 5 and the other a 6.

Having confirmed I had the right place to my satisfaction I set about starting up an email conversation in order to find as much info as I possibly could, so last Saturday I sent;-

Hello,

I represent a small Mining operation in New Zealand and I have a few questions about the products you are offering on the https://www.bitcoinasic.net/ website under your can-electric name.

The first is, what is your planned ship date? I have orders from a few other ASIC companies but they are not shipping yet.

Second, is US shipping the only option, you are based in Canada and shipping to New Zealand from their is a lot quicker.

Thanks for your time,

Looking forward to your response.Neil Fincham -- MineForeman.com

Today I got a response, a response that I was somewhat expecting;-

Hi Dear

this is fraud and we as can Electric have nothing to do with this website and their product and we don't know who is doing this fraud

regards

AriAri -- info@canelectric.ca

If you would like a copy of the email headers they are available here, I have checked it out, and apart from a few soft SPF errors it appears legitimate.

Isn't BTCFPGA dead already?

2013-02-01T14:55:00+13:00

Things have moved on with BTCFPGA, going from strange to bizarre there is a new update on the official BTCFPGA website.

Apparently after the infamous Asian Buyers deal fell through leading to a series of strange posts that ended in the total failure of BTCFPGA there are now Canadian Buyers according to a wall of text on the official website pictured to the right and quoted below.

In one huge paragraph, the author has covered may topics, ranging from the simple ""Tom" or "Dave" is no longer affiliated with this company in anyway." to the informative "My company has been developing custom ASIC and FPGA based solutions for decades we work in the military and telecommunications sectors and can accomplish this task at ease." all the way to inflammatory statements like "BEWARE OF BFL. ITS ALL LIES".

I will leave you to make up your own mind.

UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT - "Tom" or "Dave" is no longer affiliated with this company in anyway. We are a specialized devision of a huge corporate electronics manufacturer in Canada and we want you to get to know us before we take even 1 order. Ordering has been suspended for now and we are sorting out the banking and tax issues with Tom. Hopefully he does the right thing and for his credit he has givin us zero indication that he does not have full intention of doing the right thing. Luckily for everyone Tom seems to be doing the best he can to refund every single customer in a timely fashion. Now I know we lost most of our customers and that is fine. We plan to show full video proof before we take 1 single order and unlike some competitors these shipments willl be coming from the USA and will include USPS tracking numbers (DHL for international customer) Now for the hard truth We have strong reason to believe that BFL has been stringing you along all this time beause it needed your money to cover their R&D / NRE costs, its quite likely they are even using Pre-sale orders to pay their employees saleries which i am not sure of US law but is illegal in Canada. BEWARE OF BFL. ITS ALL LIES. Their terms of service contract is basically setup so they can legally take your money and there is nothing you can do about it. Yes Finally! Avalon comes out with the first ASIC device but how many will we actually see in customers hands by months end. How about the end of Febuary, March? These numbers will be very low. The sheer unprofessionalism of the supossid leaders in this industry is down right appaling talking about Bitcoin in general it's mind boggling - how these companies like BFL and bASIC can just string their customers along for months and no one comes out with anything better. My company has been developing custom ASIC and FPGA based solutions for decades we work in the military and telecommunications sectors and can accomplish this task at ease. We currently have a full functioning and hashing prototype which we plan to bring to production next week. We understand time critical solutions and it is our specialty. Instead of a full Standard CELL ASIC whch takes AGES to complete low success rates and extremey high NRE we are using FPGA hard copies of what is probably the best FPGA Bitcoin mining core in history (no it is not open source sorry ). Our ASIC chips can mine at over 2 gh/s comfortably and at a very low clock, which will ensure excellent heat disapation as well as chip longetivity. The inexpensive nature of the manufacturer of these chips will allow us to build machines that will use a large number of cheap chips and still keep electrical rates down to a reasonable level. These will be fully enclosed devices, not as cleaver as as our friends at Avalon with their stand alone wifi devices but they will include 25 FPGA hard copy ASICS which will use a maximum of 200watts per device. They will however require a host computer. The best part of our device is the speed at which we can develop them. We have a fully functional PCB fab and electronics assembly as well as a fully functional SHIPPING DEPARTMENT in house and we have already begun this process. I know it's a bit late in the game to introduce a product such as this but we wanted our news to get out there in the main stream. Tom is out. We are in. the bASIC is officially DEAD. Get ready for a 50Gh/s ASIC Based device shipping from the US with tracking and no none sense. There will be no deadline back outs and no B.S. We purchased this company from Tom for many reasons but the main reason is his un revealed completed design that can easily be converted to support 25 hard copy ASICS. The hardest work for us is already completed , Believe it or not, this IS happening and like I said before you will see a youtube video of this device hashing along before we ever ask for one red cent from the community. We cannot give an exact date at this time but It would not surprise me in the slightest that our first device ships before BFL. Professionals have taken this over and professionalism which is long over due in this industry will make all the difference. Please watch our you tube channel (coming soon) for a video of the device hashing by next week at the latest. Once the video has been shot we have decided to ship the device to conman who in my opinion develops the best Bitcoin mining software available. Please check back for more updates.https://www.bitcoinasic.net/

ASICMiner Update - 1st Febuary

2013-02-01T12:48:00+13:00

With the news of Avalon ASIC bitcoin mining devices are finally being delivered and evidence already being seen in the bitcoin difficulty it would be easy to forget that there are other bitcoin ASIC companies that are very close to delivering their own ASIC bitcoin devices.

One of the more interesting of these companies is ASICMiner who instead of selling their products to the public have sold shares in their future production capabilities on the now defunct GLBSE securities exchange.

While there currently is no way to buy ASICMiner shares, the initial float of the shares was successful enough that they were able to continue development of their ASIC miners and according to ASICMiner representative Friedcat they are close to completion.

In his latest post on BitcoinTalk Friedcat has posted an image of their pre production, fully assembles quality control bitcoin ASIC board pictured on the right. In his post Friedcat goes on to say;-

The board on the upper-left is the power supply module. The upper-right one is the back side of the hashing board with VM connectors and heatsinks attached on. The bottom-left one is the front side of the hashing board without DIP components or heatsinks. The bottom-right one is the tester for QC, and it will be replaced by the controller board in real use.Friedcat

There are 800 of these boards to be delivered to ASICMiner some time in early February for assembly according to the post, and while we still do not know what GH/s these boards will be rated for it is certain that the difficulty increase will be noticeable.

Avalon ASIC bitcoin mining devices have arrived!

2013-01-31T12:24:00+13:00

core developer and Red Hat Linux software engineer Jeff Garzik has made a post on his blog, his Avalon ASIC has arrived!

Keeping good on their promise, Avalon shipped one of their first units express directly to Jeff for verification. It seems Jeff is unpacking it right now, and taking plenty of pictures as he inspects every element of the bitcoin mining device. It seems that ASICs have finally arrived.

The 19.8 TH/s of Avalons first shipping will probably start coming online over the next few weeks only to be joined by an unknown amount of TH/s from Butterfly Labs who are set to start shipping in 11 days on the 10th of February.

UPDATE: It is now hashing at a very respectable 67 GH/s !

Avalon Batch 2 starts pre-orders at EST 9:00 AM, January 31st

2013-01-30T11:12:00+13:00

While there has not been a single Avalon ASIC bitcoin miner device seen in production by any independent person or organisation Avalon are pushing ahead with their plans for the sale and production of a second batch.

In a mail out earlier today Avalon reviled their new, as yet unfinished launch web site as well as a few technical details about their currently shipping devices and a screen shot of OpenWrt running cgminer (pictured to the right).

Furthermore according to BitSyncoms(Yifu G.) latest post batch 2 will consist of 600 units to add to the original (and undelivered as of yet) 300 from batch 1 and the power consumption is coming in at a hefty 6.6 \~ 6.7w per Gh/s.

There does seem to be some cause for concern though, BitSyncom has gone on to detail their "Bitcoin Only, No Refunds, No Proof" policy for the second batch;-

Bitcoin Only - Batch #2 of Avalon will only accept bitcoins. Only Bitcoin will allow us to move half a million USD in a few hours into places they are suppose to go to. This will also allow us to automate the order system. I am aware some EU and SA country will have importing issues due to customs, but I see a possibility for re-sellers to grow and take care of this problem.

No Refunds - Avalon has always been a BTO - Build to Order unit, we order materials and parts based on the size of each batch, this allows proper financial management, eliminate back-orders and improve overall efficiency and workflow on how we work. How else did you expect us to produce a functional ASIC unit in the same length of time a competitor has been delayed?

No Proof - Jeff and/or Bitcoin Foundation will get their unit and release reviews. Let me remind everyone what I've said month(s) ago, we can not stop people from tinkering and releasing information regarding our product, but we seldom will release any information. We will instead focusing more on killer features, some of which is already hidden in our unit. In this highly cutthroat competitive field, we do what we can to survive.

BitSyncom

BitSyncom does so on to say that there will be a trade in value for their older FPGA products, \$200 for the Iracus FPGA and \$300 for Lancelot FPGA.

While the second batch is not scheduled to ship until March or even April it is necessary for Avalon to start to take pre orders now because as BitSyncom says;- "So, we have a problem. Avalon need the money before this weekend starts to place orders for the parts."

Avalon started shipping over a week ago, so where are they?

2013-01-29T10:38:00+13:00

Many of us have been watching the bitcoin network difficulty and hash power estimates since Avalon claimed that they were shipping over a week ago on the 18th and wondering when we will start to see the evidence of ASIC power effectively double the network difficulty.

At a total of 19.8 TH/s the 300 units Avalon are currently shipping in batch one it will be very obvious when these units get turned on, but as of yet there has been no significant change to the network hash rate.

Fortunately though, there has now been news. BitSyncom has posted an update on the BitcoinTalk forums and it seems that while everything is not going to plan (their original estimates were that they would have produced about 108 units by now) things are still moving along, albeit slower than originally intended.

Currently BitSyncom says that there are 53 units being shipped right now and "this 53 has the biggest chance to make it out of the country, then we can attempt again if the news make it back to us before Feb 2. which is the deadline for getting things out of the country before CNY[Chinese New Year]."

It seems that nothing that has anything to do with bitcoin ASIC mining devices will ever go as smoothly as promised.

BTCFPGA says it was never on again

2013-01-24T14:03:00+13:00

In what is becoming a running joke of some sort Cablepair(Tom) from BTCFPGA has made another post of the official forums stating that "all that nonsense that was posted on the Bitcointalk forum last night was not me".

In an unusual move by the administrators at BitcoinTalk who usually leave questionable posts in place and just label them as such, the posts over at BitcoinTalk have since been move to the "Trashcan" by Forum Administrator Theymos so you can no longer access them because "cablepair's account is compromised".

I can report that I did read the post and it was very similar to the post that I reported on two days ago made by Cablepair (Tom) on their own official forums. Unfortunately that post now requires registration and when you register it says "The topic or board you are looking for appears to be either missing or off limits to you.".

Unfortunately I did not keep a copy of either of the posts in question, but I can tell you that they were very similar, down to the news being announced, dates and even amount of ASIC chips being delivered.

Authors Note: I usually try to keep my person opinion out of my articles, and I never want to rely on my memory for facts, but with two separate forum administrators deleting posts I have no choice in this instance.

Update: BTC_repentance from Reddit kept a copy of the official forum post, here it is;-

**Dear Friends, Lovers, and Enemies,

First off. Sorry for the scare. and believe me it was a SCARE - we had to refund over 200k and we were happy to do it because we claimed from day one that we will honor any refurequest until we go into production and we meant it. And As crazy as [censor] as it is to say so , we will sill honor it. We took multiple 20k+ refunds left and right without batting and eye lash because we believe in this project and we know we will be releasing our bASIC Bitcoin mining units sooner than everyone else, especially our good friends BFL.

Love us or hate us, I have some good friends who are original Bitcoin "old money" and they gave us the additional funding we need to finish the chip fab / packaging and take this thing into production. (THANK GOD!)

we WILL be shipping bASIC bitcoin mining devices in March 2013 and I am willing to put my own money against anyone who says otherwise.

The Design is done baby. The chips will be state-side as soon as Chinese New Year is over and for those who could not stomach the wait I don't blame you but I'm sorry to say you lost you place in line my friends.

March may seem a long time away as we all have ASIC blue balls right now, but its really not that far away, and I salute and congratulate all of you who have had the testicular fortitude to stick it out with us because you my friends will receive the ultimate reward. Sure Avalon may get some units out before the Chinese new year but that is sure to be a very limited number. On the other hand our assembly house has an unlimited assembly capacity and as soon as the Chinese new year ends we will have 16,000 freshly fabbed and packaged ASIC chips and we will be assembling those PCB's at FULL CAPACITY !We will be shipping ALL CURRENT ORDERS IN THE MONTH OF MARCH AND WE STILL HAVE ROOM FOR MORE ORDERS SO Get IN WHILE YOU STILL CAN! I stake my personal name and word on that. So hold on tight my friends because its going to be a wild ride in the month of March.

Now Let's Get ready to mine some serious coins your friend always "cablepair" Tom**

The Bitcointalk announcement was just a copy and paste of that post from Tom's own forum.

As Dave was supposedly in contact with Tom, Dave should have noticed any conflict between the information Tom was giving him and what was being posted on Tom's own forum and Bitcointalk - after all, Dave was in Bitcointalk promoting his planned managed hosting service during this period.
cablepair - official BTCFPGA Forums

Butterfly Labs ask International FPGA trade-in clients to get ready to ship

2013-01-24T13:13:00+13:00

Butterfly Labs are getting serious now, there are only 17 more days until they are expected to ship their BitForce range of ASIC products and they are now asking international customers that have ordered ASICs miners and are trading in FPGAs devices to get ready to ship back their FPGAs.

It is a bit hard to spot, but if you go to Butterfly Labs Support Forums you will see that they have put a sticky message in their shout box reading;-

Sticky: International return shipping of FPGAs: Call your shipping company to determine product category, declared value, and insurance requirements.

The Butterfly Labs Shout Box

No doubt Butterfly Labs will be contacting customers soon, if they have not done so already.

BTCFPGA bASIC bitcoin miners are back on

2013-01-21T20:41:00+13:00

Cablepair(Tom) has resurfaced on the BTCFPGA official website and in a total about face has announced "we WILL be shipping bASIC bitcoin mining devices in March 2013".

Things looked very grim for BTCFPGA just over a week ago when a strange post from Tom about delivery dates was followed by another post about Asian buyers followed yet again by a few posts by BTCFPGA representative Buzzdave saying there was no deal and that he recommended that everyone asks for a refund.

Now it seems after handing out over \$200,000 in refunds BTCFPGA is back on. Tom writes in his post that "I have some good friends who are original Bitcoin "old money" and they gave us the additional funding we need to finish".

Tom says that the March delivery date is still the target date, and he expects to have 16,000 ASIC chips at that point to distribute between the 8 chip 36 GH/s bASIC and the 16 chip 72 GH/s device. At 4.5 GH/s per chip it could be another 72 TH/s joining the bitcoin network sometime in march dwarfing Avalon's first shipment of 19.8 TH/s this week.

While Butterfly Labs are still expecting to ship their ASIC devices in early February we do not have any recent information about the numbers of ASIC devices expected to be shipped.

Avalon ASIC countdown clock hits 0 / 0 / 0 / 0

2013-01-18T10:12:00+13:00

After a month of counting the days, hours, minutes and seconds the Avalon ASIC counter has finally hit zero. The next question that I imagine everyone is asking though is "Are they actually shipping now?". Well, I have no idea, all I know is that in the latest post on BitcoinTalk BitSyncom say's they have.

If they make their target there will be 300 brand new 66 GH/s ASIC mining devices about to land on the desks of miners in the next week. That is close to 20 TH/s (or exactly 19,800 GH/s) that may be soon on-line effectively doubling the network hash rate.

Apart from the obvious effect of each unit generating the owner just over 11 bitcoins a day (or just over \$170 USD) there are other, more important implications for miners. Implications that may never happen again

The first thing we will note as these devices come on-line is that blocks, that are designed at the current hash rate to take 10 minutes to solve on average will start to be solved faster and faster because of the extra hash power. In fact, with the extra hash/s going on the average block solution may start arriving every 5 minutes, that leads us to the next interesting effect, the re-target.

As you may know, the mechanism to make sure that blocks are solved every 10 minutes on average is the difficulty. The higher the difficulty the longer the blocks take to solve and to make sure that the blocks continue to be solved every 10 minutes every 2016 blocks the bitcoin network adjusts itself (called a re-target) by changing the difficulty to match the network hash rate so that a block is solved every 10 minutes, at 2016 blocks, this should work out to be about 2 weeks.

I theory with blocks being solved every 5 minutes instead of 10 though, its not going to take 2 weeks to solve 2016 blocks, its going to be much faster possibly even as fast as 7 or 8 days.

As it happens, the next re-target is due to happen just a few days after Avalon's supposed shipping date, so with a few days for shipping the extra hash power could be going on-line just as the re-target happens and we may see the fastest re-target ever. In theory with blocks being solved every 5 minutes instead of 10, it's not going to take 2 weeks to solve 2016 blocks, its going to be much faster, possibly even as fast as 7 or 8 days.

This all leads to another, and probably the most important effect, the bitcoin block difficulty increase. The current difficulty is sitting at about 2,979,637 and it is not expected to change by much in the next re-target a few days from now, but if Avalon's ASIC's then come on-line, dropping the re-target time to 7 days it could be that in 9 or 10 days time with the next re-target we could see a difficulty close to 6 million effectively halving the bitcoin output of every single piece of bitcoin mining hardware in operation (including the new 66 GH/s Avalon ASIC's).

Add that to the recent block reward halving FPGA's may still be profitable but GPU miners would have to mine at a loss, especially if they pay for their electricity. Even at a best case scenario of having "free" electricity and using their miners to heat their house you might find that you would be better off selling your mining hardware, buying a heater and using the rest to buy bitcoins directly.

When the difficulty makes this jump I will be certainly turning off my clients GPU rigs (Don't worry, they already know all about it), and I imagine that a lot of other people will be doing the same (the sane ones at least) and this may lead to another interesting effect, since the difficulty is so high, and the hash power decreasing the next re-target may be in 3 weeks or more, just in time for the next re-target when Butterfly Labs supposedly finally ships their long delayed ASIC bitcoin miners.

All of this is theory of course, not a single ASIC has been seen in operation as of yet and so far all we have seen is delays but if I were you I would be watching.

Bitcoin ASIC race vendor status update - 16th January

2013-01-16T11:44:00+13:00

It has been an eventful few days in the bitcoin ASIC race and to be honest it would not surprise anyone if you where wondering where, when and even if bitcoin ASIC mining devices will start to make a dent on the bitcoin difficulty.

In order to attempt to clarify things, and to put the information all in one place with relevant links I have put together a few paragraphs detailing the progress of each of the four ASIC vendors so you can decide for yourself what might be happening.

ASICMiner(Bitfountain): After receiving their first batch of ASIC's back on the 28th of December friedcat has been giving steady weekly updates in their official thread over at BitcoinTalk and they are progressing towards making their ASIC's operational. In the latest update friedcat is still concerned that Chinese New Year (10th February) may interfere with their plans, but he remains hopeful.

The process of recovering and re-organising their shareholder registry after the collapse of GLBSE also appears to be progressing with many users reporting that they have received confirmation of their shares.

Avalon ASIC: BitSyncom recently upgraded their speed estimate for Avalons ASIC devices from 60 GH/s to 66 GH/s bringing their cost per GH/s down to \$19.68 and as their countdown shows, they are still expecting to ship next week with their first batch of 300 units.

That is a total of 19,800 GH/s (close to 20 TH/s) to added to the bitcoin network and that has the potential to double the network hash rate to 40 TH/s bringing the network difficulty to 6 million within the next month, possibly before anyone else even ships.

BTCFPGA: After requesting that everyone puts in refund requests (or does a credit card charge back) buzzdave over at the BTCFPGA official forums still seems to think that some deal may be reached to bring bASIC devices to a desktop near you sometime in March.

While March is still a long way off the way that delivery dates have been constantly pushed back by most vendors in the race for bitcion ASIC devices miracles do happen and they still may be the first to market (I do doubt this very much though, it seems that it will be a miracle if they ship at all).

Butterfly Labs: BFL_Josh has published a comprehensive plan that ends in the week of February the 10th with the start of their 1/3 shipping plan where one third of available stock will be shipped to new orders (first order number in, first ASIC out), the second third will be shipped to people who have upgraded their existing Butterfly Labs FPGA units (and sent them back in the week of Febuary the 3rd) and the final third will be randomly picked from both upgrades and pre-orders.

Butterfly Labs does not have the best reputation when it comes to meeting shipping dates though, the original date was closer to the middle of last year than February this year.

And so to summarise, according to the latest information available from the vendors I have built the following table.

Name	GH/s	Price	Dollar / GH/s	Expected Ship Date	Watt / GH/s
[ASICMiner](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.0)	??	????	?????	??????	???
[Avalon ASIC](http://avalon-asic.com/)	66	\$1,299.99	\$19.68	21st January	???
[bASIC 36 GH/s](https://www.bitcoinasic.net/)	36	\$599.99	\$16.67	March ???	???
[bASIC 72 GH/s](https://www.bitcoinasic.net/)	72	\$1,069.99	\$14.86	March ???	???
[BitForce Jalapeno](http://www.butterflylabs.com/)	4.5	\$149.00	\$33.11	10th February	0.8 - 1.2
[BitForce Little Single](http://www.butterflylabs.com/)	30	\$649.00	\$21.63	10th February	0.8 - 1.2
[BitForce Single](http://www.butterflylabs.com/)	60	\$1,299.00	\$21.65	10th February	0.8 - 1.2
[BitForce Mini Rig](http://www.butterflylabs.com/)	1,500	\$29,899.00	\$19.93	10th February	0.8 - 1.2

Butterfly Labs names a shipping date

2013-01-14T15:47:00+13:00

BFL_Josh has posted an update on the state of their ASIC's. According to the article they are primed to ship in the week starting February the 10th.

According to Josh the most recent delay has been caused by changing the ASIC packaging from QFN to BGA, with the changing of package type the PCB needed to be reworked and re routed. Josh also goes on to warn that due to this last-minute change it is possible that they will not meet their 1 watt per GH/s goal.

With the recent news that BTCFPGA has imploded things may be looking up in the bitcoin ASIC race but even if Butterfly Labs meet their own shipping date of February the 10th Avalon still reports that they will be shipping in less than a week and ASICMiner still have not managed to get one of their ASIC's into production.

bASIC Implodes

2013-01-13T16:05:00+13:00

[] From a post today on the official forums it seems that everything has come to an end for BTCFPGA, there will be no chips, no GH/s, no nothing.

In the latest news update form buzzdave the head of public relations at BTCFPGA it seems that the deal with the "asian buyers" has fallen through, he goes on to say "At this time, there is no deal."

The story goes as far to say that BTCFPGA recommend that you put your refund requests in as soon as possible, and if you paid with a credit card, you are probably better off putting in a change back request.

Both Avalon and Butterfly Labs are still expecting to ship this month though.

Butterfly Labs Unveils native Android Mining Platform

2013-01-09T18:03:00+13:00

For those of you that don't mine or are non-technical in nature this wont mean much but in an announcement by BFL_Josh on their forum it seems that Butterfly Labs have worked on something in the background that will be of great interest to miners;-

"Today at CES 2013, Butterfly Labs has unveiled a native Android bitcoin mining platform based around BFGMiner.

Our Android mining platform will be available for free in the Google Play store upon it's release. Initially developed to control our Minirig SC platform, we expanded the scope of the project to handle regular mining tasks with any USB based mining device that is normally compatible with CGminer or BFGMiner. While it does require a rooted device, it should function on any Jelly Bean powered Android device (likely ICS as well, but it is untested). We will be releasing source code to the Android version of BFGminer upon release of the platform to the public.

Currently, we are in a late alpha/early beta phase of the application, with mining functionality complete, but UI functionality and multiple device functionality still in the works (By multiple device functionality I mean the ability to access non-local mining resources for statistical gathering/updating. E.g. Access to / control of other minirigs or other BFG/CGMiner instances elsewhere on your network or even over the internet). By releasing this through the Google Play store free of charge, we will be able to push updates easily and quickly to everyone that desires them.

More details and screen shots to come as time allows."

There are a few people (including myself) already working on similar systems using the 3 watt Raspberry Pi's micro computer development board but a vendor supported device will undoubtedly gain a good amount of support from miners.

This will enable Butterfly Labs devices to be run without a full computer saving an extra 200 watts and therefore saving on miners bottom line.

BFL_Josh later goes on to post "All Minirig SC's come with a free Google Nexus 7 tablet, BTW."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5ZUPniBo5UQ#!

Video interview by David Perry

Tom from BTCFPGA is selling his shares

2013-01-09T12:57:00+13:00

After a somewhat illegible post last night about the new delivery date of the bASIC line of bitcoin mining devices Tom admits that he was upset about the new March shipping date and had been drinking, he has now amended his post and goes on to say "I am not the right man for this job".

As a consequence Tom has announced that he will be selling his shares to an Asian company who have most of the equipment to produce the bASIC devices in house. The new owners are 100% confidant that they can deliver within the new delivery time frame of March.

Tom appears truly apologetic for any mistakes made and goes on to say "if you are not interested in doing business with this company please feel free to fill out a refund request and we will refund your money is full."

Tom will be returning to his web hosting and computer repair business.

On a more personal note I would like to wish Tom all the best when I first got into bitcoin Tom had just shipped his FPGA line of products so he has been a constant feature in the bitcoin world for me up until now. Don't be a stranger Tom.

BTCFPGA release guaranteed shipping date

2013-01-08T19:45:00+13:00

In a second announcement in a week BTCFPGA have updated their website, and apparently "Our relationship with our PCB Fab and Packagers has gauranteed us completed ASIC wafers with complete pckages - ready to be assmebled on PCB and shipped out in March 2013 at the very latest.[sic]"

They have also provided additional specifications for both of their bASIC devices, updating the number of cores in the 36 GH/s unit from 6 to 8 and the cores in the 72 GH/s unit from 12 to 16 meaning that each core is capable of 4.5 GH/s.

Power draw have also been released for both units, at 51.3 watts for the 36 GH/s unit and 99.3 watts for the 72 GH/s unit it works out at approximately 1.4 watts per GH/s. While that cannot match Butterfly Labs claim of 1 watt per GH/s it is still a vast improvement on FPGA and GPU bitcoin miners, especially since they are using 90nm technology.

                  **Price**   **Tech Specs**                                                   **Electrical Usuage**

36 GH/s bASIC \$599.99 8 x 90nm ASIC SHA-256 Bitcoin hashing cores packaged in BG480 51.3 watts 72 GH/s bASIC \$1069.99 16 x 90nm ASIC SHA-256 Bitcoin hashing cores packaged in BG480 99.3 watts

The website goes on to say "ALL ORDERS WILL SHIP IN MARCH 2013 GAURANTEED" but with both Avalon and Butterfly Labs both promising shipment in January only time will tell if it will be too late. There is also no mention of what will happen if they fail to meet the guaranteed date.

BTCFPGA bitcoin ASIC mining device update

2013-01-06T11:43:00+13:00

In an update on BTCFPGA's support forum cablepair, forum administrator and BTCFPGA representative warns that Chinese New Year may cause issued affecting the shipment date of their new line of bASIC mining devices.

Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival is the largest of the traditional Chinese Holidays and starts on the first day of the first month of the Chinese Calender and lasts for 15 days, this year it starts on February 10th and ends on the 25th.

In the post cablepair goes on to explain that they are on the final stretch, their PCB layout is complete and about to head into fabrication (an 8 day process) but he is unsure as of yet how the Chinese New Year will change ASIC packaging and shipment date.

In an extra bit of news from the update cablepair writes;-

One other edge we can offer is our hosting plan - this will allow overseas customers to begin enjoying mining profits the same time as domestic miners, it will also give you the advantage of paying a small monthly fee instead of paying outrageous electrical usage bills.

There is very little information on this hosting plan, at the moment there is no mention if it is a temporary measure or something more permanent or even how much it will cost. With the bitcoin difficulty set to rise as the first bitcoin ASIC mining devices this may be a very attractive option for early profits for many bitcoin miners.

ASICMiner Update: The samples passed all functionality tests.

2013-01-04T10:44:00+13:00

In an update on ASICMiner's chips posted on BitcoinTalk friedcat reports that "The samples passed all functionality tests. The power consumption is also within the expected range. And as our overclocking tests had shown, they still have a lot of potentials compared to our original spec. This means that the biggest risk of our project is gone and our NRE is a fruitful spend."

Friedcat then goes on to say that their first batch of ASIC's should be on their way to the packaging plant tomorrow.

It seems that ASICMiner are now even closer to moving into limited bitcoin ASIC mining, but with the shareholders still unable to trade stocks due to the recent failure of GLBSE, and ASICMiner still being owed bitcoin by the defunct trading platform it seems uncertain how or when they will be able to move forward into full production.

Unfortunately there does not appear to be any updates so far this year from any of the bitcoin ASIC mining competition. Avalon's Countdown now shows 16 days till shipping, BFL_Josh over at Butterfly Labs still appears very confidant that they will be shipping this month (so much so that they are continuing to give away a 30 GHash/s Little Single SC every week).

The last competitor, BTCFPGA seems to be very tight lipped on where they are up to in the ASIC race (or even if they are up to anything at all).

Bitcoin 4 years on, what Satoshi didn't know

2013-01-03T18:37:00+13:00

[] 4 years ago today (or 6:15 pm on the 3rd of January, 2009 UTC/GMT) Satoshi Nakamoto's computer generated the fist ever bitcoin block. Weighing in at just under .3 of a Kilobyte it is a testament to the old adage "good things come in small packages".

While the future of bitcoin and crypto currencies in general is still far from certain, can you imagine what Satoshi was thinking when he got the notification that the first block was found? It seems unlikely we will ever know (After all, Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym) but we can say for certain, he did not know this;-

Bitcoins Lost 35,608.36304319 Bitcoins Stolen 261,666.05847975 Bitcoins Scammed 535,350.05786728

I have been conservative with my figures, but that is a total of 832,624.47939022 or 7.8% of of the current bitcoins in circulation that have been scammed, stolen or destroyed. If you consider that there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins (unless the blockchain is altered) that works out to be 3.964% of bitcoins ever to be created.

There is no need to panic, there are still well over 982,170,000,000,000 individual satoshis in circulation that have not been misappropriated so we do not need to fear the "deflationary spiral", and most of the scammed and stolen bitcoins will have already worked their way back into circulation.

If Satoshi was around (and I am fairly sure he is), I like to think that he would prefer the year 5 AS (Anno Satoshi, the bitcoin equivalent of Anno Domini) to be the year we all took better care of our wallet.dat files.

Correction: Thanks Julian702 it's 4 not 3 years, darn typo!

Happy New Year from MineForeman.com

2013-01-01T00:00:00+13:00

As another year passes and another begins I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

It has been an exciting year for bitcoin and other crypto currencies, we have seen everything from scams and crashes to highs and profits. Lets hope for more of the former and less of the latter in the year to come.

Once again I have a special gift for MineForeman Co-Op members, I will be continuing your Christmas present for another week by waiving all fees. Enjoy the extra income because it cannot last any longer it I hope to cover my electricity bill this month.

Butterfly Labs deliver on photo's of their new production line

2012-12-31T20:15:00+13:00

If you have visited the Butterfly Labs Forum in the last few weeks you will have noticed that they are taking a bit of heat from their regular posters, there has been an upsurge in dissatisfaction. The discontent stems from a perception that information is not coming quick enough.

It seems that BFL_Josh as the staff forum representative has stepped up and decided to front with a new set of photographs of their new production line in their new factory assembly being built. If you go to their forum you can see the entire series but I would like to draw your attention to this image (from BFL_Josh);-

[caption id="attachment_939" align="alignnone" width="746"] pnp1.jpg (from BFL_Josh)[/caption]

I am sorry about the photography skills (BFL_Josh needs to take classes, or get glasses), but what you are looking at in this image a 'PnP' machine, or pick and place machine, a very important part of the production line that places the extra components on the PCB to make an ASIC come to life.

I will leave it up to you to decide if to decide if the photo is fake or not, but I would like to point out that if the images are not to be believed no one is going to pay an estimated cost of about \$250,000 USD to fake a photo.

The big implication of this is, while we have seen ASCIMiner show images of their new ASIC chips we know nothing about their production line. It may be that ASICMiner can put 30 GHash/s online tomorrow, but with this kind of equipment Butterfly Labs may be able to put 1 THash/s on your desk next month.

Butterfly Labs release the BitFORCE SC Communication Protocol Draft

2012-12-29T14:46:00+13:00

Things are heating up in the ASIC race and Butterfly Labs have upped the stakes by releasing a PDF document containing the Draft Communication Protocol for their new range of BitFORCE SC ASIC mining devices.

The document posted today on Butterly Labs forum by staff member BFL_Josh describes how mining software sends SHA256 jobs to the device and how to receive and interpret the results. Current mining software already works with Butterfly Labs FPGA family of devices but the new BitFORCE SC devices have significant changes as to how they communicate.

With the release of this document the developers of mining software such as cgminer can begin to build the drivers necessary to support Butterly Labs devices when they are released.

ASICMiner the dark horse in the bitcoin ASIC race may have just come in first

2012-12-28T21:54:00+13:00

While there has been a lot of focus on bitcoin ASIC devices that miners like you and I can buy, it does not mean that they are the only bitcoin ASIC devices that are been worked on.

While Butterfly Labs, Avalon and BTCFPGA have been hard at work trying to be the first to bring an ASIC to your desktop another company has been working on a different business model, and according to today's announcement on BitcoinTalk ASICMiner looks like it may have jumped into first place in the race for bitcoin ASIC devices.

Before you crack open your copy of Bitcoin-QT though, I have to state again, ASICMiner are running a totally different business model and try as you might you are most likely never going to get one of their devices on your desk.

To get in on ASICMiner you would have had to bought one (or more) of the 200,000 shares that were listed on the now defunct bitcoin security's site GLBSE back in August 2012. When GLBSE shut down they took any chance to buy shares with them, along with the list of shareholders that had actually bought shares. Fortunately after a lot of emails though, it seems that the ASICMiner crew managed to recover the share registry.

Even if you were one of the few that actually managed to get ASIC shares you still will not be receiving a shiny new ASIC device from them, under ASICMiner's business plan they do the mining for you in their own facilities with their own staff. It is the few that managed to get in on the IPO float on GLBSE who will share in the bitcoins mined.

You may ask why I am brining this up now, but there is a very good reason, this shaky photo taken with a camera phone earlier today;-

What you are looking at according the announcement is 95 ASIC's (Yes, I zoomed in and counted them) apparently capable of 30 GHash/s.

It has to be said though 30 GHash/s is not going to be making much of a dent in the current 20,000 GHash/s capability of the bitcoin network as a whole but it is a start, a sort of beginning of then end for every other bitcoin mining device out there (and they also don't say that only 95 ASIC's were received or that this was the only shipment).

It will be a while until we see the evidence of these ASIC's on the bitcoin network and difficulty, they still need to finish the manufacturing process mounting them on PCB's with all of the other electronics necessary to make them start to chew through SHA256 hash's but many (including myself) will be watching http://blockchain.info/pools and http://bitcoindifficulty.com/ for the first signs of change.

Avalon's bitcoin ASIC Countdown has started

2012-12-28T18:00:00+13:00

In a bold move Avalon ASIC have put a countdown clock on the front page of their website ticking down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until they ship.

Using a bit of simple maths and a calendar that works out to be Monday the 21st of January 2013.

The most recent official announcement from Avalon's competitors Butterfly Labs was on the 10th of December stateing that they are hoping for delivery of their ASIC chips from the manufacturing plant in China in 30 days (approximately the 9th of January 2013). Once received Butterfly Labs must then go through a testing & assembly process adding still more days to their actual shipping date.

The 3rd ASIC company in the race, BTCFPGA with their bASIC line of bitcoin mining devices have not updated their website in a while and it still states that they will ship in December 2012 (Still possible but highly unlikely). The second batch of bASIC devices from BTCFPGA is scheduled for shipping in January 2013, that may prove to be a more realistic target.

So, if websites are to be believed it seems that all 3 ASIC bitcoin mining device companies may be shipping within a few days of each other.

The rumour mill in the bitcoin community is writhe with accusations of scams, lies and misinformation. It seems to be anyone's guess when or even if any ASIC will find their way to the desk of a bitcoin miner.

That leaves the greatest potential for early ASIC profit to be over at Bets of Bitcoin.

Important Update:No sooner that I released this article ASICMiner seems to have actual chips!

New Bitcoin ODP Editor in town

2012-12-27T11:02:00+13:00

The ODP (Open Directory Project) or dmoz.org is one of the true grandfathers of the Internet. Started in 1998 it had a simple but very ambitious goal, to organise and categorise the Internet.

Fast forward 14 years to today the ODP contains just under 5 million unique websites and is still growing but there is, and always has been an issue with the ODP and it also happens to be its greatest advantage. Every single listing is reviewed and maintained by a small crew of volunteer editors, and compared to the amount of listings the number of editors are truly microscopic.

This can lead to delays of months (or even years in some cases) to get your site listed or updated as an editor finds the time to review your site manually and ensure that it fits into a strict set of rules and guides. Once you were listed though you could expect higher priorities from search engines and more hits.

Well, things are about to change in the bitcoin category. After going through the application process quite some time ago I yesterday received a notification that I had become an ODP editor for the bitcoin category (on christmas day no less). Suffice to say, I am stoked and I promice to get submissions dealt with in a quick and timely manor (and be fair and impartial as I can).

For now I am just working my way through the listings and submissions and learning the ropes. Very soon though I plan to alter the structure of the bitcoin category from;-

- Bitcoin
-- Mining

To something more like;-

- Bitcoin
-- Alternative Chains
-- Clients
-- Data
--- Market
--- Blockchain
-- Exchanges
-- Games
--- Gambling
-- Merchants
-- Mining
--- Hardware
--- Software
--- Pools
-- News
-- Online Wallets
-- Payment Processors
-- Tools

But this is not a dictatorship, I would like your input (and more importantly your sites). There is a lot for me to do but first of all I need to get the categories right (if you could hold off submitting until I do that would be appreciated) so I am asking what have I missed? If your site falls under a category not listed above, or if you have some suggestions please let me know, my contact details are here (Please put ODP in the subject so I can sort them out better).

There are a few guidelines when it comes to ODP categories, a few points to keep in mind are;-

There should be 3-4 listings in each category.
The category should reflect the keywords for the listing (e.g. If it is a Bitcoin Mining Pool it should be in Bitcoin: Mining: Pools:, the is VERY important for SEO, the search engine's pick up their keywords from the category).
Gambling sites have an additional set of guidelines.
Adult sites have even more guidelines. I am seeking further clarification on these.

I am excited to get to work on this but I want to get it right so any other suggestions are welcome. Please also feel free to spread the word, I want to bring the ODP bitcoin category to life.

Update: I have posted over at BitcoinTalk if you prefer to post there.

Update 2: Added a post over at Butterfly Labs for the crowd over there.

Merry Christmas from MineForeman.com

2012-12-25T00:00:00+13:00

Merry Christmas Bitcoiners and Co-Op Members!

As New Zealand is the first country in to world to see in Christmas (or any day for that matter) I would like to be the first to wish you all an excellent Christmas! At this moment I am probably asleep but I will be spending the day enjoying christmas with family and friends (a few of who are miners with us).

I also have a special present for all the MineForeman.com Co-Op Miners, I have turned off the 25% fees for mining with us until the new year as a thank you for all your support and mining hardware.

Another bitcoin exchange in trouble

2012-12-22T20:47:00+13:00

As early as last September there has been talk in the bitcoin community about concerns with BitMarket.eu. BitMarket was one of the very first exchanges in the European Union and began operating on February 25th, 2011, just under two years ago.

There have been a few issues with BitMarket account details being stolen (along with the bitcoins in those accounts) and yet other accounts being mysteriously frozen without explanation or response from support.

It now appears that those concerns were justified, in a thread on BitcoinTalk the user M4v3R who is the Owner/Operator of BitMarket made a post announcing "Right now there are 1786 BTC pending withdrawal, which I can't honor..."

M4v3R goes on to explain that he considers the problem with the 1786 BTC pending withdrawal (approximately \$24,111 USD at today's rates) is his own fault and explains that the difficulties began when he decided to provide a hedge fund service using his previous trading experience and yet another bitcoin service, Bitcoinica.

When Bitcoinia went offline and subsequently into liquidation on August 1st, 2012 19,980 of BitMarket's clients bitcoins went with it. BitMarket did not decide to inform its users it seems.

M4v3R is asking for donations to be sent to 1Km5GFMat1DXcbvMTeH9ZvLGKvFCLBA9dM and is now looking for investors to bail BitMarket out.

World ending? Create a Brainwallet!

2012-12-20T12:10:00+13:00

The end of the world is nigh! With traditional currencies there is a saying “you cannot take it with you” but believe it or not with Bitcoin you can.

It occurred to me that when the world ends in the upcoming apocalypse tomorrow on the 21st 2012 you can use a BrainWallet to take your fortune to [fill in your appropriate afterlife location] with you. Once there you can connect up to the local blockchain and you are ready to go, complete with your earthly wealth.

On a more serious note, often when someone new comes to me to get setup in the mining game they are not truly dedicated geeks like myself and are only getting into the “bitcoin game” as a speculative measure to diversify their portfolio (i.e. they are in it for the money). They don’t want to run a Bitcoin Daemon, keep their own copy of the block chain or run a deterministic wallet, they just want a safe and secure way of storing their bitcoins without the need to write down their private key. I usually get them to create a BrainWallet to deposit their funds into.

A BrainWallet is a surprisingly simple bit of technology, the idea is that you come up with a pass phrase and use it to create a bitcoin private key by performing a quick SHA256 operation. The bitcoin public key (or bitcoin address) is then decoded from the private key and you are good to go, you just have to transfer your funds to the bitcoin address you generated and you are in effect storing your bitcoins in your brain.

For example, if they created a new brain wallet using the pass phrase “MineForeman.com is the best bitcoin blog in the universe” the public key, or bitcoin address would be;-

12LjGbVpWx3DPjrHEtxF1ucJReF4UfshSV

And the Private key would be;-

5J3pVkkqDCNWS3YovGqHxVoMzzAGaWVAxEE6LhxUcGDKD4VJn4b

Now they could transfer their funds into the generated public bitcoin address above and at any time from next monday to the end of time (before next monday apparently) they can use the private key that was generated to retrieve those funds. All they have to do is remember their pass phrase and they can regenerate the private key.

If you are like me and cannot do SHA265 hashing functions in your head their are plenty of sites on the internet that can do those calculations for you on the internet such as bitaddress.org and brainwallet.org, even Jon Matonis over at Forbes Magazine wrote an article on BrainWallets earlier this year.

So there you are, now you CAN take it with you.

A word of Warning: Chose your pass phrase carefully, the one I chose above has very limited entropy meaning there are only a total of 19 different characters in the phrase (“abceFgilmMnorstuv.” and space) so when you create your pass phrase try to use a mix of capitals, punctuation and special characters (*&\^%\$#@!) to increase your entropy, and never use something that is written down somewhere else (e.g. in a book or a web page).

Another Warning: Whatever you do, make sure you are able to remember your pass phrase correctly with all of the punctuation, capitalisation and special characters, if your forget it, or even just cannot remember it exactly your bitcoins are lost.

Bitcoin ASIC Mining Hardware Roundup

2012-12-17T13:37:00+13:00

[] With the recent press activity surrounding Bitcoin ASIC miners I thought it time for an article explaining what they were and what might soon to be available. I say might because as so far as I can tell even the supposed suppliers of these ASIC devices have not seen a single “retail ready” unit.

First, a word about ASIC. ASIC stands for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit. I realise that's quite a mouthful to say and sounds quite exotic but they are more common than you might think, chances are that from where you are sitting you can touch two or three devices containing ASIC’s. In fact if you look under your right hand right now (or left if you are a lefty) your mouse almost certainly contains one or more.

ASCI’s are chips designed to do one thing and one thing only, but they do that particular task very well. When it come to talking about bitcoin up until now (or more precisely shortly from now) people have mined with general purpose processors designed to do other tasks such as the CPU and GPU in your computer, while they can mine for bitcoins that is not what they were designed to do. FPGA devices, or Field Programmable Gate Array devices have also been used to mine bitcoins and while they are far superior to CPU’s and GPU’s they are still general purpose devices that have had the bitcoin mining software "programmed" into them.

ASCI’s bitcoin miners on the other hand are built ground up and fully optimised to do those complicated SHA256 computations at rates that totally obsoletes any mining technology seen to date at a fraction of the running cost.

While the cost for each individual ASIC is also quite low, sometimes even measured in cents for large orders of hundreds of thousands of individual units the cost to design, prototype and manufacture a single ASIC is measured in the millions so while the cost to the manufacturer for an individual unit may be low they still need to recoup those millions.

So, now onto what is being offered. The criteria to get onto this list was quite simple, if I could find a pre-order form for the device it made the list. The information that is available for each offering is quite sparse so I chose to only include the name, price, GH/s (1,000,000,000 Hash's per second) and how many GH/s each of your dollar buys, feel free to use the links provided to find out more information directly from the supplier.

Bitcoin ASIC Mining Hardware

(Listed in alphabetical order)

Name	GH/s		Dollar per GH/s
Name	GH/s	Price (USD)	Dollar per GH/s
[Avalon ASIC](http://avalon-asic.com/)	60	\$1,299.99	\$21.67
[bASIC 36 GH/s](https://www.bitcoinasic.net/)	36	\$599.99	\$16.67
[bASIC 72 GH/s](https://www.bitcoinasic.net/)	72	\$1,069.99	\$14.86
[BitForce Jalapeno](http://www.butterflylabs.com/)	4.5	\$149.00	\$33.11
[BitForce Little Single](http://www.butterflylabs.com/)	30	\$649.00	\$21.63
[BitForce Single](http://www.butterflylabs.com/)	60	\$1,299.00	\$21.65
[BitForce Mini Rig](http://www.butterflylabs.com/)	1,500	\$29,899.00	\$19.93

As you can see there is something to fit just about any budget from the hardcore enterprise miner all the way down to the hobbyist.

It is also very important to note again, none of these devices are available yet. You are able to pre order them though but do so at your own risk.

Disclaimer: I have absolutely no relationship with any of the ASIC companies mentioned in this article, I neither recommend or recommend against any particular vendor or device.

Authors Note: Since I run mining equipment for my clients there may be a conflict of interest here, I have tried to keep this as impartial as possible though, judge for yourself.

Update: transisto over on Reddit points out that organofcorti has also written two articles on ASIC choices as well, I have read them and they are very good. They are a bit more technical than I try to present, but if you don't mind they are well worth the read.

Butterfly Labs push back ASIC delivery (Again)

2012-12-13T12:06:00+13:00

In a not totally unexpected move Butterfly Labs have pushed back the delivery date of their next generation ASIC bitcoin mining products. In a statement on the Butterfly Labs Forums dated the 10th of December BFL_Josh writes “After talking with our liaison tonight and still having not received a final confirmation date, we were as tired of this as everyone else is, so we continued to push for a date and they gave us 30 days from today”.

While he also says in the same statement “it may very well be that things will wrap up sooner than that” with receiving, repacking and outward shipping it seems that the 9th of January is going to be the very earliest anyone is going to have an ASIC device on their desk.

With many miners still running their GPU’s at a loss either as some sort speculative measure or an altruistic attempt to stave off anyone mounting a 51% attack it seems that ASIC’s cannot come soon enough.

This announcement brings Butterfly Labs delivery date in line with its ASIC competition, Avalon and BTCFPGA, who are both reported to be on target for shipping sometime in the first quarter of 2013.

Want to destroy bitcoin? I am going to tell you how.

2012-12-10T12:59:00+13:00

For every person that advocates bitcoin it seem there is at least one person who will tell you that it is a colossal waste of electricity, effort and time as well as being some sort of scam. If you are one of those people, this article is for you.

There is a badly kept secret with bitcoin, it is vulnerable to attack. The attack itself is technically quite easy to execute and would result in the total paralysis of bitcoin. Properly executed you would be in control of the entire bitcoin network and you would be able to bring the entire thing to a screaming halt destroying bitcoin once and for all (or at least as long as you can keep the attack going).

To mount this attack first I will need to explain a bit about how bitcoin actually works (sorry about that, I promise to try to not to get too technical).

The bitcoin network relies on the miners using their hardware and software to do what amount to brute force attacks to “crack/guess” the correct SHA256 (an encryption algorithm) to solve a block.

Each attempt to solve the block requires the miner to calculate a hash value for the block they call these attempts a hash, and the speed that they can make these attempts is called their hash rate. When they calculate the correct hash they collect a reward (25 bitcoin at the moment) plus any transaction fee’s included in the block.

That block is then appended to the end of what is called the blockchain validating all of the transactions in that block and every previous block (and every transaction in those blocks). This validation cements all transactions in place making them virtually impossible to reverse.

Attacking the miners directly is close to impossible, they do their work behind a Peer to Peer network designed to resist any sort of direct attack called “The Bitcoin Protocol”. Peer to Peer (also called P2P) networks are notoriously hard to stop or even disrupt, the major Movie & Music Industries have tried to stamp out another P2P network you probably have heard of before called bittorrent with no success. Even if governments were to outlaw mining (all 196ish of them) people say they will still do it (like the bootleggers did in the US prohibition years).

Attacking the transactions is also close to impossible because they are stored in everyone's copy of the blockchain and crypto-graphically verified by the mining process, it's a sort of open ledger that anyone can read and verify themselves.

So to bring down bitcoin you are going to have to beat them at their own game, fight fire with fire if you like, and use the mining and bitcoin protocol against them.

What you will need to do is build yourself your own mining operation just like the miners do but you are going to have to build one bigger and better than any of them, your mining operation is going to have to be able to equal everyone else's hash rate plus a bit more (it is called the 51% attack by the way) and then you are going to start verifying blocks just like they do but you are not going to include any transactions in them! In effect, bitcoin will continue, but no one can transfer their bitcoins to other users.

Lets do some quick calculations so you can get a shopping list together, we have all the numbers because the blockchain and network hashrate are all public information. First we can see that the bitcoin network is capable of about 25 Thash/s (or 25,000,000,000,000 of those hash/guess’s per second) so we will have to do a bit better, lets say 26 Thash/s.

It would be good if we could use the new ASIC mining devices (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) were available, a single high-end ASIC device is said to be capable of up to 1,500 Ghash (or 1,500,000,000,000 hash per second) for \$29,899 USD. 18 of those devices would net you a respectable 27 Thash/sec for just \$538,182 USD but unfortunately they are not available yet.

Even when they are available, according to the unofficial wait list there are already at least 24 high-end devices on pre-order as well as a plethora (always wanted to use that word) of other lower-end devices totaling a staggering 53.9745 Thash/sec meaning that the total available hash rate will soon jump to somewhere in the region of 75 or more Thash/sec. This also has the effect of putting a time constraint on your 51% attack, it must be done soon, before the advent of the cheap ASIC devices in the next few months.

With the current high-end FPGA mining devices (Field Programmable Gate Array) capable of 26.4GHash/s (26,400,000,000 hash per second) you will need 985 devices coming to a total of \$15,065,575 USD but alas there are not 985 of those in existence and they no longer seem to be in production (with the new ASIC's close on the horizon I don't imagine many people have been buying them).

That all taken into account it seems that you will have to use good old tried and tested GPU’s for your 51% attack. A current high-end GPU overclocked to the max (ATI 7970) will set you back as little as \$379.99 each for a still decent 828Mhash/s (828,000,000 hash per second). Unfortunately you would need 32,698 of them for a total of \$12,424,913 (AMD may give you a bulk discount though if they have that many).

Add to that you will also need the computers to run them, so assuming 3 ATI 7970’s per computer you will need 10,900 computers with high end main-boards and power supplies for around about \$500 each totaling \$5,450,000 USD.

You will also have to pay for power, a very good Industrial Rate Cost per kilowatt-hour is about \$0.07 USD so your 9.177372 Megawatt (estimate) will set you back \$15,417.98 USD a day, or \$462,539.55 USD a month.

I am unsure of even where to start to estimate a place to put this all, internet connections or cooling cost but I am sure you can find something, perhaps an old nuclear reactor or something (Even better, inside a dormant volcano, you could have sharks with lasers on their heads).

So there you have it, for a small price of \$20 million USD or so and an ongoing cost of about \$1 million per month (you will have to keep buying equipment to keep pace after all as you need to continue the attack indefinitely) you could paralyze bitcoin.

Note: You could also use the above equipment to mine about \$50,000 USD a day or \$1.5 million a month.

Also Note: All dates and figures are an estimate as at December 2012.

Authors note: If anyone actually wants to attempt this, I want a job! (I already have one, but I have always wanted to be an evil genius)

Bitcoin-Central begins operating as a Bank (Sort of)

2012-12-07T10:22:00+13:00

In an announcement on BitcoinTalk earlier today Bitcoin-Central revealed that they have partnered with Aqoba and Credit Mutuel to begin operations as Payments Service Provider (or a PSP). While not quite exactly the same as a bank a PSP falls under all the regulatory restrictions and requirements as a bank except they are not able to issue credit.

They will fall under the European Union regulatory body but they are open to international clients so no matter where you live you can now open the equivalent of a European bank account (assuming your government allows it).

If you look at the story on BitcoinTalk you will find quite a few advantages to this move but a short list of advantages to this are;-

Non bitcoin Deposits stored in individual Credit Mutuel accounts.
An IBAN Number will be issued within the next few months.
Non bitcoin deposits 100% guaranteed by the French Government.
You will soon be able to get a Debit Card issued.
You will be able to use your BTC with your Bitcoin-Central Debit Card.

As with any new service there are downsides, the one that I can see most bitcoin users borking at is to take full advantage of the service you must positively identify yourself with a scan of a government-issued photographic identification document (Passport, National ID Card, Driver's License etc..). While this is not an issue for most bitcoiners quite a few value their anonymity and it also opens a new avenue for Identity Theft.

It seems to me that Bitcoin-Central has just gained a step ahead of the other bitcoin exchanges.

Reddit bitcointip bot in Beta

2012-12-05T10:23:00+13:00

As the bitcoin Reddit users will tell us, Reddit has taken the plunge into the bitcoin world with its new feature, the bitcointip bot.

After last months post from Reddit CEO Yishan Wong saying that "So - no promises, but we're looking into it.". The expectation was that if anything was going to happen it would be months away, but no, it seems someone has had something cooking all along.

I wont go into the specifics of how to use the bitcointip bot, it is already well documented. I will say that this seems to be large step forward for the general acceptance of bitcoin. According to Alexa who track global internet traffic, Reddit is the 131st most visited website in the world and 66th in the US.

The idea is that you can use bitcointip bot to reward Reddit authors for comments and posts you particularly enjoy. While I cannot see anyone actually earning a living out of this (I have been wrong before though) it seems a nice way to give people the thumbs up.

As for me, I probably wont be using it with my MineForeman Reddit account, to me it would seem that I am buying responses to my own posts but I have already put a few BTC into my personal Reddit account for use in other, non bitcoin related parts of Reddit.

Clarification: The bitcointip bot is not something made by Reddit itself, it was made by the redditor NerdfighterSean. Sorry for the confusion.

GPU Miners still going strong

2012-12-03T12:38:00+13:00

One of the predictions that I posted might happen when the mining reward dropped from 50 BTC to 25 is that GPU Miners will get switched off because the price in electricity to run them would far outweigh the bitcoin reward they generate, I proposed that this would lead to a drop in the bitcoin network computation speed.

Well, I was wrong.

If you have a look at the graph below (provided by the great team over at http://bitcoin.sipa.be/) you will see that today, the 3rd of December 2012 a full 4 days after the reward drop the network computation speed is actually growing.

I admit it, I am baffled. Doing calculations based on my GPU miners and New Zealand domestic electricity costs you would get just under 1.9 times the amount of bitcoins by turning off your GPU miners and buying bitcoins directly with the money that you saved on your electricity bill, I cannot imagine that it would be any different anywhere else in the world.

There are a few ways that GPU miners can still be profitable, MineForeman runs on industrial power rates (substantially cheaper than domestic rates, you have to buy a lot of power though), some miners are running FPGA rigs, others live in "fixed" power cost apartments and still others just suck up their parents power.

I cannot believe that everyone has these advantages though, I struggle to believe that even most of us miners do. Perhaps at the end of December when people compare their power bill to the amount of bitcoins they have generated we will see a drop in generation power and an increase in volume at the exchanges, but I am not making any predication again!

Dissecting Bitcoin Block 210,000

2012-11-30T13:55:00+13:00

The chatter is a buzz in the bitcion community, the 210,000th bitcoin block has been mined, there are now 10,499,925 bitcoins and the reward miners receive from solving a block has dropped from 50 to 25 bitcoins. At precisely 2012-11-28 15:24:55 UTC a miner called Laughingbear submitted the successful hash to Slush's mining pool.

This is a pivotal step for bitcoin but lets forget about economics or technical stuff for the moment, lets look at the actual block itself. For those that want to collect a bit of history you can download the block data here. For those of you who cannot read JSON here a few facts about the block;-

The Hash was 000000000000048b95347e83192f69cf0366076336c639f9b7228e9ba171342e.
The Merkle root was 3cdd40a60823b1c7356d0987078e9426724c5b3ab439c2d80ad2bdd620e603d8.
The Nonce was 4069828196.
The Difficulty was 3,438,908.96.
There are 10,500,025 bitcoins in circulation ($127,784,087.25 USD).
There are 1,050,002,500,000,000 satoshis (individual bitcoin units).
The block was solved in 23 minutes and 2 seconds.
A single high-end CPU (Intel Core i7 3930k) would have had a 50% chance to have solved the block in just over 7 years.
There were 457 individual transactions contained in the block.
The Mt.Gox average trade price for 1 BTC was $12.17 USD at the time.
There were 25,421.70093021 BTC worth of transactions in the block ($313,000 USD).
The Reward was 25 BTC ($300 USD).
The transaction fees, also collected by the mining pool were 13.56295554 BTC ($160 USD).
The 25 BTC were deposited into the address 1NEU779yvLaFk39k4Q3QdLjwpWTdWCbzqL.

Laughingbear, the miner who generated the new block later appeared on BitcoinTalk and posted;-

I am very new to mining, and have been at it less than a week. This was the first block I have ever found. I decided to become involved in Bitcoins, because I feel that it could be the answer to all the evils of government controlled currency. This isn't a "get rich quick scheme" for me. I believe that what we are doing can change the world. I am incredibly honored to be a part of Crypto-Currency history.

Thanks to Slush's pool for letting me join, if any new miners are out there looking for a great pool https://mining.bitcoin.cz/

In case this post somehow goes down in history, I just want to say.... [censored] The Federal Reserve System.

Donations gladly accepted at :
17wnLRDGD9xSzxBTte8poWJzqXqkzr7Q9G

Laughingbear

I am unsure that "[censored] The Federal Reserve System" will go down in history like other famous quotes such as "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" but you never know.

Note: BTC and USD are abbreviations for Bitcoin and United States Dollar respectively. The USD figures are approximate as at the time of generation.

Authors Note: I have no strong feelings about The Federal Reserve System either way.

Bitcoin mining reward has now halved

2012-11-29T07:48:00+13:00

Just a quick note, at 15:24:38 28th of November 2012 GMT the 210,000th bitcoin block was mined by laughingbear at Slush's pool . From now on the reward will only be 25 bitcoins or less.

As I have mentioned in previous posts the next few days are liable to be roller-coaster of a ride, and one that I will be avidly watching.

Happy Halving Day everyone!

What will you be doing when the Bitcoin reward halves?

2012-11-28T18:56:00+13:00

According to the Bitcoin Clock it is estimated that in less than 12 hours the bitcoin block count will reach 210,000 and mining reward will half from 50 bitcoins to 25 as was discussed in a earlier post.

I say estimated because the rate that blocks are solved, while designed to be every 10 minutes, can vary greatly depending on the hash power of the bitcoin network, the current difficulty and outright luck. So the exact time cannot be known, it is possible (but very unlikely) that the remaining 72 blocks could be solved in 15 minutes, or even 15 days.

The bitcoin community is certainly buzzing, if you go over to BitcoinTalk there are plenty of threads discussing it but looking to the traditional news services the big story of the day is the premier of the new Hobbit Movie in Wellington. While I definitely will be going to the Movies in the next few days it reminds me that Bitcoin has a way to go yet.

It is a momentous event in the evolution of bitcoin, but I am sure that it will pass by without so much of a squeak for most of the world. However I do wonder if there will be a roar in 2016 when we get to 420,000 blocks and the reward halves again to 12.5 bitcoins (Assuming of course that we survive the upcoming Mayan Apocalypse in 22 days on December 20th).

For me, the halving will probably be somewhere around 7am Wednesday the 28th of November 2012 (I live in New Zealand, you will have to work out for your own time zone sorry) so I will most likely be eating coco pops.

Where to look for Bitcoin exchange data

2012-11-27T22:14:00+13:00

With the bitcoin Halving Day quickly approaching I received a quite a few emails from people asking where to find market data and a few asking for where to buy some bitcoins. I am not going to go into the purchase of bitcoins at the moment, perhaps I will go into that at a later date (to tell the truth, I have never bought bitcoins, I mine them).

I will however give you a quick primer on where I go for exchange market data.

First off, there are A LOT of exchanges. Just look at as the Exchanges page over at the bitcoin wiki. I have not even visited most of them and I have only actually used two them (perhaps one day I will find the time to explore more).

The source I use most and get my data feed from (and is reputed to be largest) is Mt.Gox. If you visit their home page you will see a dark grey strip along the top of the page that has current live spot prices at the Mt.Gox Exchange, even better though if you click on the strip a very nice candlestick chart will drop down.

With the Mt.Gox chart up (or down depending on your point of view) you will see a few buttons that allow you to zoom to Day, Week and Month data. You will also see a link to Mt.Gox Live, a rather creative way of charting market data.

Mt.Gox also haves an API or application programming interface for the truly geeky among us that allows us to pull data directly from their exchange to use in our own applications, the MtGox USD Price box to the right is a simple example. For another (and far better example) go have a look at what Clark Moody does using the API, JavaScript and WebSockets.

A word of caution: I am not affiliated with Mt.Gox and neither recommend or recommend against using Mt.Gox for financial transactions, I do however recommend looking at their market data.

Welcome Slashdotters!

2012-11-27T08:05:00+13:00

Yesterday my story on halving day was picked up by one of my favorite sites of all time

Fortunately my web & data server did not fall prey to the Slashdot Effect (server work is my job, if it did I would not be able to show my face around the office for weeks).

So yeah, Hi Girls and Guys! I am reading through all your comments now. Feel free to use the subscribe box on the right if you would like to be kept informed about the upcoming halving, I feel it is going to be an interesting ride for the next we while.

Halving day is almost upon us!

2012-11-23T17:11:00+13:00

Built into the design of bitcoin is a mechanism that rewards miners (like us) for solving blocks. Every block solved rewards the miner or pool 50BTC plus any transaction fees included in that block, it serves two functions;-

It encourages people to mine
It introduces new currency in a controlled manner.

Bitcoin is built so that this reward is halved every 210,000 blocks solved. The idea is as bitcoin grows the transaction fee's become the main part of the reward and the introduction of new bitcoin's slows down to a trickle. This also means that there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins in circulation.

Well, in less than 4 days the block count will reach the first of these 210,000 block milestones and the reward for solving a Bitcoin block will half from 50BTC to 25BTC. (Have a look at bitcoinclock.com)

The implications to this are huge and for the most part unknowable. There are two ways I can see it going;-

Mining is a delicate balance of difficulty vs electricity costs, the price of bitcoin depends on the electricity cost to generate those coins so if the cost to generate a bitcoin increases the price of a bitcoin rises to match.
People stop mining bitcoin because the cost outweighs the return and the difficulty of generating a bitcoin (currently at 3368767) plummets until it is once again profitable to mine.

I believe that it will be a mix of both, I think the price will rise and the difficulty will drop but that is just me speculating. The truth is we are in for an interesting time, I don't even want to factor in the new bitcoin mining hardware (ASIC) that seem to be about to hit the market.

Wordpress accepting Bitcoin as a payment method

2012-11-16T07:09:00+13:00

It seems that Bitcoin is gaining more traction as a payment method. Today WordPress, the leader in blog software and used by a whole host of popular blogs and sites (including this one) announced that Bitcoin will be accepted as a payment method.

I wonder who will be next to accept bitcoin.

I particularly like their reasoning for accepting bitcoin (From the announcement);-

PayPal alone blocks access from over 60 countries, and many credit card companies have similar restrictions. Some are blocked for political reasons, some because of higher fraud rates, and some for other financial reasons. Whatever the reason, we don’t think an individual blogger from Haiti, Ethiopia, or Kenya should have diminished access to the blogosphere because of payment issues they can’t control. Our goal is to enable people, not block them.

Together with the Reddit announcement earlier it seems to have been a been a good week for bitcoin.

Search and Seizure executed in Mitt Romney's "Bitcoin Ransom" case

2012-11-13T13:49:00+13:00

For those of you that weren't aware a few months ago a hacker alleged that he had managed to "retrieve" then-presidential candidate Romney's tax returns and unless \$1,000,000 USD worth of bitcoin's were transferred to the bitcoin address 1HeF89wMjC[shortened] he would release them to the press.

He/She went on to say that if other interested parties wanted the tax returns released they could transfer the same amount to address 12AP6iCw[shortened].

Nothing much happened, no release of the tax returns, no \$1 million dollar payment just a lot of speculation and rumors. I had thought it totally went away like so many other Internet stories.

Well, apparently something did happen, a Tennessee man called Michael Brown (along with his family) was woken at 6:10 AM September 14th and issued with a search warrant. The Secret Service then proceed to seize computers and electronic devices used to run his small local ISP operation.

While no charges have been laid yet on his site he describes how it has left him with no way to make a living for him and his family.

Reddit looking at adding Bitcoin to it's subscription model

2012-11-13T11:23:00+13:00

In a recent article on siliconANGLE they point out that in a recent thread Reddit CEO Yishan Wong revealed that they are considering Bitcoin as a payment method.

For those that have not used Reddit it is a "Social News" site that users contribute links to. The links contain anything from News articles, discussions or even just amusing images. Reddit then gauges the popularity of the item by the amount of users that submitted the link and/or voted the link up or down.

Subscribed users to the "Reddit Gold" program get addition features such as Add free use, comment highlighting and statistics.

ECB Report on Virtual Currencies

2012-10-14T16:28:00+13:00

Quick note for today, the European Central Bank have put out a report on Virtual Currencies. Bitcoin is mentioned 185 times in total.

You can download the report from them here or here for a local copy.

In short, they are watching.

Why MineForeman?

2012-10-07T14:50:00+13:00

Today I hit the publish button and go forward with MineForeman.

I have been mining for bitcoin's for some time now and have been helping out friends and acquaintances to do the same.

With the new ASIC devices about to hit the market quite a few of us have put in orders but a lot of us (most actually) don't want to go to the hassle to running them themselves. As luck would have it though, running servers is what I do as a job and really enjoy (Yes, I am that big a geek).

So I offered to run their equipment, pay for the electricity and generally keep everything going as close to 100% efficient as possible. In return for that they would let me use their equipment for 25% of the time (6 hours a day) to generate bitcoin's for myself.

MineForeman came to life to keep these people (I call them the co-op members) informed about bitcoin and how their investment is going.

By the way, if you want someone to run your gear, have a read of the FAQ and drop me a note via the contact form and I am sure we can work something out so you can join the co-op too.