4 ms·

This just sounds grandiose but really, renting a 747-400F is not such a big deal. This http://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-aircraft-operati

by chx 9y ago

This just sounds grandiose but really, renting a 747-400F is not such a big deal. This http://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-aircraft-operating-expenses/ http://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-air... article gives a figure of 24-27000 USD an hour. You need it how long? Ten hours? Twelve? Using a random card Amazon gives us a box size of 13.4 x 9.5 x 3.1 about 400 cubic inches. Say http://www.cargolux.com/our-expertise/cargo-equipment/aircraft/747-400f-specifications http://www.cargolux.com/our-expertise/cargo-equipment/aircra... we have 21 347 ft^3 that is some 36 887 616 cubic inches which means some 92 000 such boxes give or take. There are inefficiencies etc so let's say it's 30 000 cards. Say at 300 USD each. That's a cool ten million bucks. The plane likely costs less than half a mil. It's not a biggie. But do they really? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmemza/cryptocurrency-mining-fueling-a-gpu-shortage https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmemza/cryptocurr... says "Enigma started with an installation of about 700 GPUs and now consists of several larger buildings," Schindler told me in an email. "Obviously at this size the operation draws attention from the hardware manufacturers directly and we have agreements with them." Compared to that I have some doubts they need to fly thirty thousand cards in. Maybe they rented a pallet in a 747F...

pmorici 9y ago
A side business I run supplied them with components in 2016. Based on what I shipped them I'd say they deployed some where in the neighborhood of 18,000 graphics cards in 2016 and they were supposedly ramping up to go even bigger in 2017. I don't have any insight into what they are currently up to because that scaling apparently involved hiring a eastern European engineer on the cheap to masquerade as a customer to try and obtain confidential hardware design details from me so he could rip off my product for them.
- hueving 9y ago
  >I don't have any insight into what they are currently up to because that scaling apparently involved hiring a eastern European engineer on the cheap to masquerade as a customer to try and obtain confidential hardware design details from me so he could rip off my product for them. Sounds like an interesting story here. How did you out him/her?
  - andreasklinger 9y ago
    i seriously can't wait for Bitcoin the movie i imagine it to be somewhere between Hackers and Departed PS: given we currently have an emoji movie, had an facebook movie. A bitcoin movie is only a question of time - too many good stories here.
    - mcv 9y ago
      I think you could fill a season of TV drama.
    - _e 9y ago
      I would rather have a Netflix series... even up to now there just has been too much to fit into one movie. If there are elements of Hackers in it, tensorflow and kubernetes is killed off by Apache's many offerings. The Gibson will be moved to the SMACK stack. Google is killed off because of a lack of any real customer service. Apache controls the ledger and the hero hackers will convince China, Russia and the USA to take all of their super computers to win back the ledger.
  - pmorici 9y ago
    It was pretty transparent, almost comically so. My business makes adapter boards that let large mining operations reuse power supplies from old server equipment to power their mining operations. Each power supply has a different pin-out and way to turn it on and off many are proprietary and don't have publicly available data sheets. I figure out how they work and design an adapter board with the required logic to operate them safely as a general purpose 12 volt power supply. The business operates on a model where the customer pays a minimal fee, $100, to purchase a prototype of a new design but I retained the rights to the designs and did all the design, development, and testing on my own dime and then amortize those costs over the life of the product. So one day they come to me and say they want to start manufacturing at a factory they've made a deal with in China and ask me to give them the design files free of charge. I told them that I wasn't going to just give them the companies IP for free because a lot of work went into developing it etc... but that we could discuss what an appropriate price was if they really were dead set on doing their own manufacturing. There was some back and forth but their position was that they didn't think there was anything special about the product and the most they were willing to pay for access to the design files and a license to manufacture it in unlimited quantities was $100 per design. I pointed out a number of things that we did the most important of which was making sure the design and materials could safely handle the high current loads the boards had to withstand, etc... Shortly after I refused their $100 offer as insultingly low I get an email from some guy purporting to be from eastern Europe and saying he was interested in purchasing 500 units. Before he would go through with the purchase he needed to confirm some technical details of the board design because he was "concerned his environment was very hot and dirty". He then went on to ask a list of questions including things like what are the number and thickness of the copper layers in the PCB. These were the exact reasons I had discussed with the Genesis guys as to why our designs had value. At that point I was 99% sure of what was going on. So I responded that we didn't give out those specifics but that we could send him a prototype to test and he never responded. To satisfy my own curiosity a little while later I used a personal email address to send the guy a message saying that a friend had given me his name and asking if he still did hardware design because I needed some design work done for crypto-currency related projects. A day later I got a response that removed any remaining doubt about what was going on.
- wott 9y ago
  > confidential hardware design details It used to be called 'documentation"...
  - pmorici 9y ago
    No, we have really good documentation including pin-outs for the headers on all our products right on our site. They were asking for things like the thickness and number of copper layers and other things related to the routing that never would have been revealed even back in the day.
isoprophlex 9y ago
To me, this stuff that's suggestive of embellishment ('business is going so well, we're renting entire planes to ship our GPUs) is par for the course in the recent climate of crypto news. I never know if I'm being shilled or not anymore...
mcv 9y ago
Don't they get some kind of bulk discount on those cards? A deal to pack them in bulk and ship them straight from the factory seems kind of obvious.
- ascorbic 9y ago
  I'm certain they get a large discount, but that's not going to be related to the shipping cost. The best deal for them is likely to be to negotiate the price "Ex Works", which means the customer handles transportation and clearance from the factory gate. That way they can negotiate their own prices for the shipping, and handle the customs clearance in the way that works best for them. I doubt they're literally chartering a 747. I can't see how that would be better than just shipping them as normal air freight.
ascorbic 9y ago
I highly doubt they're actually chartering a 747 anyway. They're probably just sending them as air freight.

by chx 9y ago

pmorici 9y ago

A side business I run supplied them with components in 2016. Based on what I shipped them I'd say they deployed some where in the neighborhood of 18,000 graphics cards in 2016 and they were supposedly ramping up to go even bigger in 2017. I don't have any insight into what they are currently up to because that scaling apparently involved hiring a eastern European engineer on the cheap to masquerade as a customer to try and obtain confidential hardware design details from me so he could rip off my product for them.

hueving 9y ago
>I don't have any insight into what they are currently up to because that scaling apparently involved hiring a eastern European engineer on the cheap to masquerade as a customer to try and obtain confidential hardware design details from me so he could rip off my product for them. Sounds like an interesting story here. How did you out him/her?
- andreasklinger 9y ago
  i seriously can't wait for Bitcoin the movie i imagine it to be somewhere between Hackers and Departed PS: given we currently have an emoji movie, had an facebook movie. A bitcoin movie is only a question of time - too many good stories here.
  - mcv 9y ago
    I think you could fill a season of TV drama.
  - _e 9y ago
    I would rather have a Netflix series... even up to now there just has been too much to fit into one movie. If there are elements of Hackers in it, tensorflow and kubernetes is killed off by Apache's many offerings. The Gibson will be moved to the SMACK stack. Google is killed off because of a lack of any real customer service. Apache controls the ledger and the hero hackers will convince China, Russia and the USA to take all of their super computers to win back the ledger.
- pmorici 9y ago
  It was pretty transparent, almost comically so. My business makes adapter boards that let large mining operations reuse power supplies from old server equipment to power their mining operations. Each power supply has a different pin-out and way to turn it on and off many are proprietary and don't have publicly available data sheets. I figure out how they work and design an adapter board with the required logic to operate them safely as a general purpose 12 volt power supply. The business operates on a model where the customer pays a minimal fee, $100, to purchase a prototype of a new design but I retained the rights to the designs and did all the design, development, and testing on my own dime and then amortize those costs over the life of the product. So one day they come to me and say they want to start manufacturing at a factory they've made a deal with in China and ask me to give them the design files free of charge. I told them that I wasn't going to just give them the companies IP for free because a lot of work went into developing it etc... but that we could discuss what an appropriate price was if they really were dead set on doing their own manufacturing. There was some back and forth but their position was that they didn't think there was anything special about the product and the most they were willing to pay for access to the design files and a license to manufacture it in unlimited quantities was $100 per design. I pointed out a number of things that we did the most important of which was making sure the design and materials could safely handle the high current loads the boards had to withstand, etc... Shortly after I refused their $100 offer as insultingly low I get an email from some guy purporting to be from eastern Europe and saying he was interested in purchasing 500 units. Before he would go through with the purchase he needed to confirm some technical details of the board design because he was "concerned his environment was very hot and dirty". He then went on to ask a list of questions including things like what are the number and thickness of the copper layers in the PCB. These were the exact reasons I had discussed with the Genesis guys as to why our designs had value. At that point I was 99% sure of what was going on. So I responded that we didn't give out those specifics but that we could send him a prototype to test and he never responded. To satisfy my own curiosity a little while later I used a personal email address to send the guy a message saying that a friend had given me his name and asking if he still did hardware design because I needed some design work done for crypto-currency related projects. A day later I got a response that removed any remaining doubt about what was going on.
wott 9y ago
> confidential hardware design details It used to be called 'documentation"...
- pmorici 9y ago
  No, we have really good documentation including pin-outs for the headers on all our products right on our site. They were asking for things like the thickness and number of copper layers and other things related to the routing that never would have been revealed even back in the day.

isoprophlex 9y ago

To me, this stuff that's suggestive of embellishment ('business is going so well, we're renting entire planes to ship our GPUs) is par for the course in the recent climate of crypto news. I never know if I'm being shilled or not anymore...

mcv 9y ago

Don't they get some kind of bulk discount on those cards? A deal to pack them in bulk and ship them straight from the factory seems kind of obvious.

ascorbic 9y ago
I'm certain they get a large discount, but that's not going to be related to the shipping cost. The best deal for them is likely to be to negotiate the price "Ex Works", which means the customer handles transportation and clearance from the factory gate. That way they can negotiate their own prices for the shipping, and handle the customs clearance in the way that works best for them. I doubt they're literally chartering a 747. I can't see how that would be better than just shipping them as normal air freight.

ascorbic 9y ago

I highly doubt they're actually chartering a 747 anyway. They're probably just sending them as air freight.