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 the cryptographic strength of Bitcoin. It was previously reviewed in the review , but by that time there was no software allowing to test it in real combat conditions. I managed to make the chip work properly.

Mining as a way to make money was always a dubious venture. At the beginning of year 11, I bought several video cards for mining. But I managed to mine as many coins as if I would just buy them. Everyone with whom I spoke had approximately the same result, slightly different in both plus and minus.

If any attacker wanted to block the work of the Bitcoin network a year or two ago, he would need to release a limited series (10-100 thousand) of specialized chips. What could possibly be technically done. Support for robustness must be provided with technically advanced devices. But now, thanks to Bitfury chips and other manufacturers, this will become much more difficult.

I used to think that making asics is a hoax. Avalon and BFL delayed the release of devices indecently long. With bitfury, it didn't work out that way. All those who demonstrated desire and technical training received the chips for free.
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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) moves in ~ 1.5 seconds. If the chip reported on each conversion and returned 1 bit per result, then a 2.7 Gbps bus would be required. The return of the hash itself is not provided in principle, therefore, as a hardware sha2 () for general use, the chip will not work.

The chip communicates on the SPI bus and returns incomplete solutions, the results in which at least 32 MSB bits are zero. There are few such solutions and even 20 kHz for one chip is enough.

Bitfury provided test code for working with chips . Based on this test code, I wrote a module to the miner cgminer, which uses the chip in real conditions. The code is written for use in a 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 !!! Soon the boards will come and I will update the article with photos.

Information on the acquisition of chips / devices is still controversial. The first batch is already sold through metabank.ru. For Europe, chips seem to be sold on www.bitfurystrikesback.com

Bitcoin is very popular among Russian-speaking users. Judging by bitcointalk.org, Russian is the # 2 language after English (leaving behind German, Spanish, etc.). It is not yet known how many Russian-speaking users will post in English branches. Google Trends ('bitcoin' query) also demonstrates high usage intensity in Russia. It can be said that mining is a sport where Russians occupy leading positions.

UPDATE 1 : Nice article with tests and photos (achieved 2.4 Ghashes / s).