Product Round-up Bitcoins are either the new bubble economy or the future of online commerce. It’s not the first time anonymous e-money has been tried – ask Mondex – but Bitcoin does seem to have traction.
There are things you might want that you can buy with it, such as Tesla cars and Virgin Galactic trips to space. Zynga has announced that it will take Bitcoin for in-game payments, and there is a host of things you can buy through Bit Premier.
So, if you want to get into mining – perhaps you have some rack space doing nothing – you need to know what is on the market.
This is an ambitious article. It aims to tell you what is available and what it costs. In any other market that’s reasonable, but here products go in and out of stock constantly, driven by an erratic supply chain, particularly for chips. Prices reflect the value of Bitcoins, prices of rival hardware and the availability of that rival hardware. And much of this is shrouded in truths, half-truths and lies. Even more secretive is the company 21e6 which has raised $5m to build ASICs it will only use itself.
Comparing the miners starts with understanding what it takes to make a Bitcoin. Please forgive any over-simplification. Briefly, there is an algorithm to work out what is the next Bitcoin to be mined. Solving this requires a number of hashing operations. How many depends on how many coins have been minded previously so it’s an increasing level of difficulty. Initially this could be done with moderately specced PC but as more coins got mined this moved to using code, which took advantage of the super-fast graphics processors on video cards and then to dedicated hardware: ASICs designed purely to mine Bitcoins. Even these have evolved from homebrew to large technical teams.
If the bottom falls out of the Bitcoin market, all that equipment is useless. There is no other purpose to which it can be put. The processing is immense. While you can’t directly link mining hashes with FLOPS, it has been a couple of months since Bitcoin mining passed 1019 petaflops, or roughly the computing power of all the other computing tasks in the word – not allowing for what might go on in the NSA and GCHQ.
Which is where this round-up comes in. What hardware should you buy? How much money will it make and how easy is it to run?
CoinTerra TerraMiner
Of all the Bitcoin companies, CoinTerra is the one with the most chip design experience. The CEO was the lead CPU Architect at Samsung, working particularly on mobile. A mobile processor needs to balance three things: power consumption, heat generation and size. For Bitcoin mining only the first two matter, but mobile experience is invaluable and most of the CoinTerra team have worked in mobile.
The company taped out on 9 November and got wafers back on 28 December – an incredibly fast turn around guaranteed by paying expedite fees to Global Foundries in Dresden Germany – and then shipped to Taiwan for packaging. Its reputation is good on the basis of keeping customers up to date, although is has not shipped anything.
Engineering updates come thick and fast. It seems to be on target to ship this month. The ASIC is called Goldstrike I and has 120 hashing units on each die to give an anticipated minimum of 500GH/s on each chip based on yield. Bitcoin processors often ship with some hashing units failing in the manufacturing process. The chip has four dies.
The chip will go into the TerraMiner range of products, most of which have been discontinued: only the TerraMiner IV is currently on sale. It has four chips to give 2TH/s. The 4U box has two power supplies of 1.1kW each mounted out of the cooling stream with five fans front and back blowing air through custom liquid-cooled heat exchangers and liquid cooling the top of the chip. CoinTerra seems to have given the most thought to the thermal problems of Bitcoin mining and for ‘professional’ use, but the majority are not sold to data centers.
The 2TH/s box costs $6,000. Processing is done by a BeagleBone Black, a Raspberry Pi-alike open source board running at 1GHz.
This seems to be the best thought-through of the devices here, particularly if you have some rack space looking for something to fill it. But it hasn’t shipped yet, but is nonetheless taking orders for May delivery. Unusually for a clean company, CoinTerra has a decent looking website, but don’t let that put you off.
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