Bitcoin mining as a sport
I got into the hands of the Bitfury chip, which, at the moment, is the most advanced way to support Bitcoin's cryptographic strength. It was previously considered in the review , but by that time there was no software to test it in real, combat conditions. I managed to get the chip to work fully.
Mining, as a way to make money, has always been a dubious enterprise. At the beginning of 11 years, I bought several video cards for mining. But I managed to mine as many coins as if I just bought them. Everyone with whom I spoke had approximately the same result, slightly different both in plus and minus.
If some attacker would like to block the Bitcoin network a year or two ago, he would need to release a limited series (10-100 thousand) of specialized chips. What would be technically possible to do. Support for cryptographic strength should be provided by technically advanced devices. But now, thanks to the Bitfury chips and other manufacturers, this will become much more difficult.
I used to think that making asic is a hoax. Avalon and BFL delayed the release of devices indecently for a long time. With bitfury, it didn’t. Everyone who demonstrated their desire and technical training received chips for free.
This microcircuit is a “bunch of pure energy”, for each clock cycle it performs approximately 10 sha2 (sha2 (x)) transformations. Total approximately 2,700,000,000 conversions per second (2.7 Ghashes / s). 32bit nonce (counter) gets over in ~ 1.5seconds. If the microcircuit reported on each conversion and returned 1 bit per result, then a bus with a bandwidth of 2.7 Gb would be required. The return of the hash itself is not provided in principle, therefore, as a general-purpose hardware sha2 (), the chip will not work.
The chip communicates via the SPI bus and returns incomplete solutions, the results of which are at least 32 high-order bits - zeros. There are few such solutions, and even 20 kHz for one chip is enough.
Bitfury provides test code for working with chips. Based on this test code, I wrote a module for the cgminer miner, which uses the chip in real conditions. The code is written for use in raspberry pi and uses its SPI module.
At the moment, the chip is soldered as a dead bug , against all the rules of feng shui. But even in such conditions, it gives out about 800 Mhash / s !!! Boards will come soon and I will update the article with photos.
Information on the purchase of chips / devices is still contradictory. The first batch has already been sold through metabank.ru. For Europe, chips seem to be sold at www.bitfurystrikesback.com
Bitcoin is very popular among Russian-speaking users. Judging by bitcointalk.org, Russian is language # 2 after English (leaving behind German, Spanish, etc.). It remains to be seen how many Russian-speaking users are posted to English threads. Google Trends (request for 'bitcoin') also shows high usage in Russia. We can say mining is a sport where Russians occupy leading positions.
UPDATE 1 : Nice article with tests and photos (achieved 2.4 Ghashes / s).