Here we have the largest, most important chipmaker in the US making and selling chips specifically for Bitcoin transaction processing (AKA "mining"). I was not expecting to see something like this, from a company like Intel, anytime soon.
This sort of thing makes me think Bitcoin is on track to become a permanent component of the world's financial infrastructure, regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about it, because any efforts to outlaw it or regulate it out of existence will now hurt, not just tiny startups and offshore operators, but also leading companies like Intel, which is of strategic importance to the US.
Most politicians in the US will be very reluctant to mess with a fast-growing, potentially large market for US technology products and financial services.
You can use these as electric heaters. Since there is no mechanical work, all energy input is radiated as heat. In this scenario, capex aside, the hashes come out for free and can offset a little of the electricity bill. If they can be encased in passive radiators and run at 60+ Celsius, that'd be awesome for a home boiler. Lower temperatures would be really nice for keeping heated pools hot.
Political ones have failed, since with national currencies we end up with inflation and spending the resources of the future (i.e. debt).
The decision to "suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold" has lasted indefinitely. This means the government can print its own money with no accountability, until it acquires everything and everyone.
Have you looked into proof of stake? It is a pretty good contender, but is vulnerable to Sybil attacks in case of a network partition. With no objective way to tell legitimacy (like "work" that was wasted in proof-of-work), a network partition can not be resolved.
Please spend a few minutes reading more on this topic, as you may change your view after learning where Bitcoin’s electricity usage fits into the broader picture. Some good starting points may be:
Even if this is not cutting egde, it will sell and more so with all those small ASIC chips upon their top node, will help fill out the wafers to allow the unused jaggy edges to be filled with these smaller dies in production.
Now, even without that possibility, Intel is ramping up its fabrication and offerings and if they can maintain that momentum outside their core buisness as they seem to be going, then the more products they can keep the fabs busy and turn some profit is good. Even if they broke even upon this, they would still have this and other avenues to pad out production runs and their lab running costs.
Depending upon how this goes, may see this fused into some GPU offering down the line for that market, certainly they have the ability to do that if the demand is there and also help open up there GPU plans more.
So on the face of it, sure it's another option for crypo miners, but deeper, it too me seems like Intel leveridging some low hanging fruit to give there fab offerings more momentum and shifting towards competing with the TSMC's being an end goal perhaps, certainly lots of catchup. Though the aspect of production wafers and having lots of smaller chips you can pad out a wafer, sure does seem like a capital move and be interesting if they go down that path. For me, it seems like mixed wafer production using smaller dies to flesh out the unused space left by larger dies upon a round wafer as a great way to reduce waste and turn that into profit.
"... the BonanzaMines System is shown achieving 55 J/TH whereas the Bitfury Clarke achieves 40 THash/s at 56 J/TH while the Canaan Avalon A9 does 30 TH/s at 58 J/TH."
55 J/TH versus 56 and 58 J/TH from competing vendors. Small margins of course matter at scale, but this (preliminary) improvement in energy efficiency, less than 2%, isn't really impressive. Nor does it seem like an amount that can make a dent in the energy consumption problem of Bitcoin mining. Are they aiming at selling their product cheaper than the competitors' offerings? Doesn't sound like Intel. Am I missing something?
They are also comparing against some older generation ASICs...the S19 from Bitmain[1] which 'mature' tech today gets 34J/TH, 95TH/s which is like... 40% better?? It's a super weird comparison point that they chose. Or maybe I am reading something wrong here...
Indeed, it has a ring of "Hello, fellow youngsters" to it that Intel is even in this space. Maybe AMD and ARM has them thinking they're behind in other areas
The idea that more efficient mining chips will reduce Bitcoin's energy consumption is just wrong. Miners will just buy and use that new chip for as long as the value of the block reward exceeds the energy cost for mining it.
The mining network should always converge to an equilibrium where X$ worth of electricity is consumed for producing (a little more than) X$ worth of BTC, no matter how efficient mining chips are.
Personally I feel that Bitcoin miners are being unfairly targeted whereas the real issue is unclean energy production. Bitcoin is an easy target because a lot of people believe it is overvalued or worthless which gives rise to arguments such as "Bitcoin mining is unnecessarily wasteful".
It's not novel, it's been used since some of the very first mining ASICS. The reason you don't see it anywhere else is that the matching needs to be very good, down to giving chips busy work if they are idle otherwise you get interesting results.
Bitmain announced the S19XP [1] coming out in the 2nd half of this year with an efficiency of 21.5 J/TH, so Intel still has a lot of catching up to do.
Another news report [2] mentions
> After news of the company's efforts came to light, Intel finally officially acknowledged its blockchain/Bitcoin silicon program, divulging that it already has several large customers for the second-gen chips. That includes BLOCK (helmed by CEO Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame), Argo Blockchain, and GRIID Infrastructure.
> Intel hasn't shared details of the second-gen chips and systems yet, but we do know they are derivatives of the BMZ1 ASICs shown below.
but I'd be surprised if this second generation has bridged the nearly 2.5x efficiency gap...
Probably not. The era of affordable high-end GPUs is over and I don't think it is coming back even after the entire cryptocurrency-nonsense bubble pops. The expected price of a high-end GPU is now fixed in the >$1k range.
I would take any claims of improvement with a grain of salt until independent verification has been done. This is Intel we're talking about, they have a very long history of overpromising and underperforming when it comes to power/compute efficiency.
What's described here is deeply noncompetitive, even if it was released today. From the pictures of the PCBs in that article I suspect it is the combination of both being incredibly expensive to produce and miserably inefficient.
Bitcoin is quite unsafe. For example if you send money to a cause you care about, but government disagrees with it, they can disallowlist your wallet and you probably won't be able to touch any coins derived from it ever.
If Intel was serious, they should have looked into supporting Monero or other truly anonymous currencies.
Thankfully -- for now -- most merchants do not seem to respect any such blacklist/greylist. However, for exchanges, KYC regulation may end up having some similar effects.
Intel's no dummies. They know that a lot of investors have heard of Bitcoin and not a lot of investors have heard of monero. They didn't get into this business because they wanted to contribute to a decentralized currency. They just want to make money.
Considering that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies intend(ed) to operate in a decentralized manner, your point probably matters only for those who want to deal with centralized exchanges that follow such allow or deny lists. There are services and ways to connect with others to trade (though they may come with some more difficulty compared to a centralized exchange).
Maybe somebody interested in retro-crypto-computing could write a Deep Crack emulator for modern GPUs! All the specs and sources for the hardware and software are published in the free book "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design". I wonder how fast it could run now -- it would be cool to run it in browsers with WebGPU!
In 1998, the EFF and John Gilmore published the book about "Deep Crack" called "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design". But at the time, it would have been illegal to publish the code on a web site, or include a CDROM with the book publishing the "Deep Crack" DES cracker source code and VHDL in digital form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker
>"We would like to publish this book in the same form, but we can't yet, until our court case succeeds in having this research censorship law overturned. Publishing a paper book's exact same information electronically is seriously illegal in the United States, if it contains cryptographic software. Even communicating it privately to a friend or colleague, who happens to not live in the United States, is considered by the government to be illegal in electronic form."
So to get around the export control laws that prohibited international distribution of DES source code on digital media like CDROMS, but not in written books (thanks to the First Amendment and the Paper Publishing Exception), they developed a system for printing the code and data on paper with checksums, with scripts for scanning, calibrating, validating and correcting the text.
The book had the call to action "Scan this book!" on the cover (undoubtedly a reference to Abby Hoffman's "Steal This book").
Afaik Phil Zimmermann was one of the first to do it, in '95 through MIT Press—when his PGP circulated a bit too widely for the export regulations. However, the question of him being protected under the 1st wasn't decided in the court.
[+] [-] cs702|4 years ago|reply
Here we have the largest, most important chipmaker in the US making and selling chips specifically for Bitcoin transaction processing (AKA "mining"). I was not expecting to see something like this, from a company like Intel, anytime soon.
This sort of thing makes me think Bitcoin is on track to become a permanent component of the world's financial infrastructure, regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about it, because any efforts to outlaw it or regulate it out of existence will now hurt, not just tiny startups and offshore operators, but also leading companies like Intel, which is of strategic importance to the US.
Most politicians in the US will be very reluctant to mess with a fast-growing, potentially large market for US technology products and financial services.
[+] [-] belltaco|4 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, mining isn't scaled with processing transactions.
Bitcoin has a hard cap of 7 transactions per second, regardless of whether 5 miners are running or 5 million.
The amount of resources that are put into mining scale with the price of BTC, not transactions.
Also Nvidia has made mining-only silicon for several years now. So Intel isn't the first major company doing it.
[+] [-] danuker|4 years ago|reply
On one hand, it shows Intel believes mining is here to stay.
On the other hand, I suspect it makes up a very small part of their business, and any regulation won't hurt much.
[+] [-] fguerraz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danuker|4 years ago|reply
Political ones have failed, since with national currencies we end up with inflation and spending the resources of the future (i.e. debt).
The decision to "suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold" has lasted indefinitely. This means the government can print its own money with no accountability, until it acquires everything and everyone.
Have you looked into proof of stake? It is a pretty good contender, but is vulnerable to Sybil attacks in case of a network partition. With no objective way to tell legitimacy (like "work" that was wasted in proof-of-work), a network partition can not be resolved.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aaaaaaaaata|4 years ago|reply
Dora the Explorer broadcasts?,
or are you referring to some other waste (y'know, to someone) of electricity/CO²?
[+] [-] bannedbybros|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jansen555|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] EvanWinget|4 years ago|reply
https://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-mining-americas-most-misund...
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/03/05/the-frustrating...
[+] [-] Zenst|4 years ago|reply
Now, even without that possibility, Intel is ramping up its fabrication and offerings and if they can maintain that momentum outside their core buisness as they seem to be going, then the more products they can keep the fabs busy and turn some profit is good. Even if they broke even upon this, they would still have this and other avenues to pad out production runs and their lab running costs.
Depending upon how this goes, may see this fused into some GPU offering down the line for that market, certainly they have the ability to do that if the demand is there and also help open up there GPU plans more.
So on the face of it, sure it's another option for crypo miners, but deeper, it too me seems like Intel leveridging some low hanging fruit to give there fab offerings more momentum and shifting towards competing with the TSMC's being an end goal perhaps, certainly lots of catchup. Though the aspect of production wafers and having lots of smaller chips you can pad out a wafer, sure does seem like a capital move and be interesting if they go down that path. For me, it seems like mixed wafer production using smaller dies to flesh out the unused space left by larger dies upon a round wafer as a great way to reduce waste and turn that into profit.
[+] [-] daneel_w|4 years ago|reply
55 J/TH versus 56 and 58 J/TH from competing vendors. Small margins of course matter at scale, but this (preliminary) improvement in energy efficiency, less than 2%, isn't really impressive. Nor does it seem like an amount that can make a dent in the energy consumption problem of Bitcoin mining. Are they aiming at selling their product cheaper than the competitors' offerings? Doesn't sound like Intel. Am I missing something?
[+] [-] zardo|4 years ago|reply
If you make a dent in the energy consumption problem, doesn't the network automatically adjust to pop the dents out (increase the difficulty)?
[+] [-] bunnie|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://support.bitmain.com/hc/en-us/articles/900000253583-S...
[+] [-] 0des|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olalonde|4 years ago|reply
The mining network should always converge to an equilibrium where X$ worth of electricity is consumed for producing (a little more than) X$ worth of BTC, no matter how efficient mining chips are.
Personally I feel that Bitcoin miners are being unfairly targeted whereas the real issue is unclean energy production. Bitcoin is an easy target because a lot of people believe it is overvalued or worthless which gives rise to arguments such as "Bitcoin mining is unnecessarily wasteful".
[+] [-] fnord123|4 years ago|reply
Jevon's paradox indicates that they will make it much much much much worse.
[+] [-] tapoxi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkj|4 years ago|reply
> That allows an input voltage of 8.875 V to be divided into 355 mV across each ganged ASICs group
[+] [-] RL_Quine|4 years ago|reply
https://i.imgur.com/hAss6mY.jpeg
They are presumably ganging them at each voltage level to try to reduce the candescence.
[+] [-] zouhair|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tromp|4 years ago|reply
Another news report [2] mentions
> After news of the company's efforts came to light, Intel finally officially acknowledged its blockchain/Bitcoin silicon program, divulging that it already has several large customers for the second-gen chips. That includes BLOCK (helmed by CEO Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame), Argo Blockchain, and GRIID Infrastructure.
> Intel hasn't shared details of the second-gen chips and systems yet, but we do know they are derivatives of the BMZ1 ASICs shown below.
but I'd be surprised if this second generation has bridged the nearly 2.5x efficiency gap...
[1] https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002021120711304...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-details-its-bitcoin-...
[+] [-] pluc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WithinReason|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RL_Quine|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varispeed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyldfire|4 years ago|reply
Intel's no dummies. They know that a lot of investors have heard of Bitcoin and not a lot of investors have heard of monero. They didn't get into this business because they wanted to contribute to a decentralized currency. They just want to make money.
[+] [-] AnonHP|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaaaaaaaata|4 years ago|reply
You don't carry your checking account in your back pocket,
why would you give a small charitable fund (or anyone!) knowledge of how much you have, and where?
[+] [-] DonHopkins|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker
Maybe somebody interested in retro-crypto-computing could write a Deep Crack emulator for modern GPUs! All the specs and sources for the hardware and software are published in the free book "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design". I wonder how fast it could run now -- it would be cool to run it in browsers with WebGPU!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19916938
In 1998, the EFF and John Gilmore published the book about "Deep Crack" called "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design". But at the time, it would have been illegal to publish the code on a web site, or include a CDROM with the book publishing the "Deep Crack" DES cracker source code and VHDL in digital form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker
https://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/cracked/des/cracking-des....
>"We would like to publish this book in the same form, but we can't yet, until our court case succeeds in having this research censorship law overturned. Publishing a paper book's exact same information electronically is seriously illegal in the United States, if it contains cryptographic software. Even communicating it privately to a friend or colleague, who happens to not live in the United States, is considered by the government to be illegal in electronic form."
So to get around the export control laws that prohibited international distribution of DES source code on digital media like CDROMS, but not in written books (thanks to the First Amendment and the Paper Publishing Exception), they developed a system for printing the code and data on paper with checksums, with scripts for scanning, calibrating, validating and correcting the text.
The book had the call to action "Scan this book!" on the cover (undoubtedly a reference to Abby Hoffman's "Steal This book").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book
[...]
aasasd on May 15, 2019 | prev | next [–]
Afaik Phil Zimmermann was one of the first to do it, in '95 through MIT Press—when his PGP circulated a bit too widely for the export regulations. However, the question of him being protected under the 1st wasn't decided in the court.