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I remember when bitcoin miners were transitioning from FPGA to ASIC... I nearly threw out my back from laughter when the Chinese deceitfully copied the masks wi
by sennight 5y ago
I remember when bitcoin miners were transitioning from FPGA to ASIC... I nearly threw out my back from laughter when the Chinese deceitfully copied the masks with abandon, while also delaying fulfillment with longer and longer burn in tests.
- bserge 5y agoI don't get it, all current ASIC miners are from China.
- twobitshifter 5y agoChinese get paid to build the ASIC but instead of delivering as promised, they just keep it for themselves and mine with the designs.
- sennight 5y agoClose. If they just ghosted the client it would have been bad for that client (a managed group buy, from what I remember), but word would have spread quickly and the most they'd have had to show for it was a single revision zero ASIC for hashing SHA256 - no big deal in the grand scheme of things. Instead they churned out as many as they possibly could, only partially fulfilling orders in drips and drabs - and with a quality that made one wonder how low they were in the binning hierarchy. For some strange reason the fulfillment rate would drastically improve during periods of heightened uncertainty in bitcoin's exchange rate... Anyway, by stringing designers along like that they maintained access to later optimizations in design revisions. It was really weird to watch these early events unfold, because it provided the kind of satisfaction that accompanies the reinforcement of prior held positions - but tempered with the knowledge that you'd eventually be forced to take a bite from same shitsandwich.
- sennight 5y agolol, gee - wonder how that happened? There have been a few non-Chinese sourced chips decapped that predate the Chinese offerings, but as soon as some idiot uploaded his design to a Chinese fab in an attempt to undercut the competition...
- webmaven 5y ago> [...] delaying fulfillment with longer and longer burn in tests. Ha! "Burn in tests" indeed, that is pretty funny.
- sennight 5y agoFunnier still is the fact that the network's aggregate hashing power can easily be calculated by anyone logging the rate and difficulty of solved blocks, and that anyone would still bother trying to lie. But then the whole Craig Wright debacle hadn't yet gone down... so I guess they might have been visionaries when it came to leveraging the power of self-delusion to defeat cryptographic guarantees.