12 ms·

It looks like Intel is developing Bitcoin mining chips

84 points by mrb 12y ago

BostonEnginerd 12y ago
Intel has been doing limited foundry work for some time -- they have partnerships with Altera (they recently almost acquired them) and Rockchip. Working with this company is good for Intel -- they fill fab capacity for products that don't compete with x86.
awalton 12y ago
Actually it's even more interesting than "Intel makes a bitcoin mining chip," which really shouldn't be surprising given how much application-specific accelerators have been making noise, and how many of these chips are already on the market. Multibillion dollar companies love to hedge their bets; it'd be somewhat more surprising if nobody at Intel were working on one. No, the more interesting bit is that it looks like some stealth startup has a close enough relationship to Intel to get them to mint chips. And that's impressive; Intel's silicon manufacturing processes have historically been a black box to outsiders. It'll be a lot more interesting once more details about this pour out. This could be the start of something huge...
sjcsjc 12y ago
Link to the original article: http://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin-mining-strategy/ http://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin-mining-strategy/ This is presumably from the same source as the recent spate of "mining from toasters" articles started by FT's Alphaville [1]), but with a lot more detail. The Vimeo clip discussed in the coindesk article shows a live demo from Oct 2014 of a bandwidth auctioning protocol, (the article links to the actual transactions eg [2]) [1] http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-company-that-wants-to-put-a-bitcoin-miner-in-your-toaster/ http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-compa... [2] https://blockchain.info/address/1M9ZeSUStVHCAUqrCr5XhhYqb4GBuz9x6z https://blockchain.info/address/1M9ZeSUStVHCAUqrCr5XhhYqb4GB...
ssharp 12y ago
All for the "benefit" of mining Bitcoin. The idea is to stick these chips into household applications (e.g. USB chargers), give the appliances out for free, stick the electricity bill on you, and give 75% of the Bitcoin revenue back to the parent company. Yep, a free USB charger that you amortize over its entire use, at many multiples of what it should cost. It's great for people who love playing a guaranteed losing shell game between buying electronics and electricity. I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's impossible to profitably mine bitcoins without screwing someone else in the process. The trick is to screw them as long as possible without them knowing.
- macobo 12y ago
  This is a genuinely scary scenario. Have there been precedents of profiteering by hiding _something_ invisible to the end-user but with an ulterior purpose into normal consumer electronics?
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Lenovo's Superfish? Prior to that, the Sony rootkit CDs? Pre-installed adware in general? Amazon's thing with the always-on microphone? The Samsung TVs that report all filenames on connected devices back to a server?
    - timboslice 12y ago
      I miss the good old days of "If you aren't paying for a product, you are the product." Now, the new paradigm is: "By using our stuff, we own your data. All of it." How do Global Fortune 500 companies think bundling malware is OK still after all the bad press the last few years?
      - lmm 12y ago
        Because that bad press isn't translating into lost dollars. And dollars are the only language large companies understand.
      - 12y ago
onion2k 12y ago
I can see the advantage for the user (25% of the BTC mined), and I can see the advantage for 21 (75% of the BTC mined) and Intel (sell some chips). But what's the incentive for the electronics manufacturer in embedding these BitSplit chips? If they're not getting a cut and they're not being paid, why would they integrate a chip even if it's free? The downside risk of embedding a chip that may become obsolete, break down, or negatively impact energy efficiency surely outweighs the marketing benefit of saying '21 inside'.
- jnks 12y ago
  21 will surely dole out some of their 75% cut to hardware integration partners as a distribution fee. The ripoff here is for anyone ignorant enough to run one of these devices.
- ssharp 12y ago
  Why is 25% a benefit? If these chips profitably mined bitcoins, it would make sense to run them yourself rather than give them away. 25% isn't going to cover the electricity used.
- meragrin 12y ago
  The way I read it, the 25% is not going to the user directly. It just simply goes into an account the manufacturer controls and is earmarked for the user. The user will only be able to spend it as the manufacturer allows. This is more along the lines of Google Opinion Rewards rather than being part of a mining group.
  - ssharp 12y ago
    I have to wonder how they're going to market these things to people without breaking any consumer laws. It seems like you'd almost have to trick people into using them for any extended period of time (like after they get their first electric bill), which will make them a prime target for lawsuits, Attorneys General of every state, the FTC, Congress, etc.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
zmanian 12y ago
21 is best understood as an attempt by the VC community to break the Chinese Bitcoin mining monopoly. 21 doesn't appear to be working on Lightning Network like layer 2 technologies that would make the Bitcoin micropayments for server bandwidth viable on the blockchain. In fact as useful financial applications of on chain transactions start to materialize, even P2P payments may start to struggle to be included in blocks. 21 faces one of the most profound information security problem faced by any company. They propose to put their companies capital assets into the homes of consumers and then extract value from those assets in a manner adversarial to the consumers interests. End users/attackers can do everything from blackhole the network traffic of the device to modify the firmware to target the hashing power to a new mining pool. Virtually any weakness in the engineering has the potential to be exploited at vast scale. This should terrify them.
- pjc50 12y ago
  I would say that 21 is an attempt to extract money from the VC community by pitching Bitcoin as the "next big thing". Given that this announcement doesn't seem to have official Intel press release backing, it's a little shady. I'm also skeptical about them getting to produce a small-run ASIC on Intel's incredibly valuable 22nm FinFET production line.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > They propose to put their companies capital assets into the homes of consumers and then extract value from those assets in a manner adversarial to the consumers interests. End users/attackers can do everything from blackhole the network traffic of the device to modify the firmware to target the hashing power to a new mining pool. Virtually any weakness in the engineering has the potential to be exploited at vast scale. This should terrify them. Mark my words. If this or similar idea ever takes hold and begins to spread, I am going to start an open source project to hack those devices and redirect their hashing power where consumers want in as easy and streamlined way as possible so that everyone could do it. I'm tired of companies extracting value from customers in adversarial manner, literally telling their users "fuck you" in their faces.
  - 12y ago
zhte415 12y ago
I'd wager a large amount of virtual currency that these are not specifically aimed at virtual currencies, but virtual implementations of real-world currencies.
ForHackernews 12y ago
Bitcoin is an environmental disaster. What a horrendous waste burning electricity and real, non-renewable natural resources to generate these tokens. For all people complain about the legacy financial system, bitcoin is a real zero-sum game where the more miners join, the harder the block difficulty gets, and the more coal gets burnt.
- ikeboy 12y ago
  As long as you capture the heat, it's not a waste. Also, how much energy does the legacy finance system waste? All the energy spent to build banks, armored trucks, secured networks, etc. A couple years back they spent a couple hundred million to build a cable connecting New York and London for financial data because it was 5 milliseconds faster than what they had before.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    First of all, I don't think we should be talking about waste in terms of money, but energy used. Surely, that NY-London cable was energetically expensive, but a big chunk on that money was probably created out of arbitrary whatever-they-do-on-Wall-Street and used to pay off people and various non-energy-related costs (e.g. land laws). Secondly, as wasteful as our current financial system is, it doesn't seem to have that strong growth factor built in. Making and maintaining bitcoins depends on ever increasing energy use; energy, which is wasted in the most literal sense - burned out on nonsense computations just to show that you had enough of it to burn. I think we should treat the energy used on financial system as upkeep - unavoidable cost we have to pay because as a species, we suck at coordinating, but that we'd do best to minimize.
    - ikeboy 12y ago
      First, in terms of raw energy, I'm pretty sure finance has bitcoin beat. Second, the energy used by bitcoin doesn't need to increase. The cost of all the energy used will tend towards the price of the subsidy+fees, and the subsidy is being phased out. In a few decades the subsidy will be almost gone. If bitcoin completely replaced finance, would it really use more energy than saved by finance stopping? And you didn't address the point about capturing the heat.
hendry 12y ago
Wish intel would have workable h264 hw acceleration on Linux instead.
- hhw 12y ago
  What are you talking about? H264 acceleration with Intel graphics on Linux has been around since 2010 with vaapi.
vectorpush 12y ago
Why would anyone agree to pay for 100% of the power consumption for an ASIC that only offers 25% of the returns? Consumers may not know anything about crypto-currencies but they understand basic math. When consumers are offered 5 dollars worth of bitcoin as compensation for a 20 dollar increase on their power bill they'll simply conclude "i guess that bitcoin thing really is a scam"
- mikeash 12y ago
  Surely the idea is that the return is more than 4x the cost of the power consumed, so that it's still a net gain for the buyer? It seems unlikely to me that this would actually work out in the long term, but wouldn't that be what they're going for?
  - vectorpush 12y ago
    Then why wouldn't 21 just run the ASICs themselves and take 100% of the returns?
    - mikeash 12y ago
      That's a good question. For normal miners there's a similar question that's answered by a lack of unlimited capital. That wouldn't seem to apply here, since they're paying for the hardware themselves up-front and trying to recoup costs later. I can't figure out the answer here.
      - ikeboy 12y ago
        It doesn't make sense. There's no answer to figure out. If you have efficient miners, you either run them or sell them.
    - s73v3r 12y ago
      Then they have to pay for 100% of the power.
      - 12y ago
nivertech 12y ago
Nobody asked the most important question: "what's 21 Inc's plan in case of BTC exchange rate going south?"
s73v3r 12y ago
Intel will advertise these chips, and claim they have many in stock. They will take preorders in Bitcoin. The lead times will balloon out to several months, under the guise of "burn in testing". People will be angry at not getting their boards, and attempt to cancel their pre-orders. As they pre-ordered in BTC, however, they will not receive the same value back as they ordered, due to fluctuations in the price. A handful of people will receive their devices late, and by then the difficulty curve will have ramped up, making these devices not cost effective.

84 points by mrb 12y ago

Intel has been doing limited foundry work for some time -- they have partnerships with Altera (they recently almost acquired them) and Rockchip. Working with this company is good for Intel -- they fill fab capacity for products that don't compete with x86.

awalton 12y ago

Actually it's even more interesting than "Intel makes a bitcoin mining chip," which really shouldn't be surprising given how much application-specific accelerators have been making noise, and how many of these chips are already on the market. Multibillion dollar companies love to hedge their bets; it'd be somewhat more surprising if nobody at Intel were working on one. No, the more interesting bit is that it looks like some stealth startup has a close enough relationship to Intel to get them to mint chips. And that's impressive; Intel's silicon manufacturing processes have historically been a black box to outsiders. It'll be a lot more interesting once more details about this pour out. This could be the start of something huge...

sjcsjc 12y ago

Link to the original article: http://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin-mining-strategy/ http://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin-mining-strategy/ This is presumably from the same source as the recent spate of "mining from toasters" articles started by FT's Alphaville [1]), but with a lot more detail. The Vimeo clip discussed in the coindesk article shows a live demo from Oct 2014 of a bandwidth auctioning protocol, (the article links to the actual transactions eg [2]) [1] http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-company-that-wants-to-put-a-bitcoin-miner-in-your-toaster/ http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-compa... [2] https://blockchain.info/address/1M9ZeSUStVHCAUqrCr5XhhYqb4GBuz9x6z https://blockchain.info/address/1M9ZeSUStVHCAUqrCr5XhhYqb4GB...

ssharp 12y ago

All for the "benefit" of mining Bitcoin. The idea is to stick these chips into household applications (e.g. USB chargers), give the appliances out for free, stick the electricity bill on you, and give 75% of the Bitcoin revenue back to the parent company. Yep, a free USB charger that you amortize over its entire use, at many multiples of what it should cost. It's great for people who love playing a guaranteed losing shell game between buying electronics and electricity. I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's impossible to profitably mine bitcoins without screwing someone else in the process. The trick is to screw them as long as possible without them knowing.

macobo 12y ago
This is a genuinely scary scenario. Have there been precedents of profiteering by hiding _something_ invisible to the end-user but with an ulterior purpose into normal consumer electronics?
- pjc50 12y ago
  Lenovo's Superfish? Prior to that, the Sony rootkit CDs? Pre-installed adware in general? Amazon's thing with the always-on microphone? The Samsung TVs that report all filenames on connected devices back to a server?
  - timboslice 12y ago
    I miss the good old days of "If you aren't paying for a product, you are the product." Now, the new paradigm is: "By using our stuff, we own your data. All of it." How do Global Fortune 500 companies think bundling malware is OK still after all the bad press the last few years?
    - lmm 12y ago
      Because that bad press isn't translating into lost dollars. And dollars are the only language large companies understand.
    - 12y ago

onion2k 12y ago

I can see the advantage for the user (25% of the BTC mined), and I can see the advantage for 21 (75% of the BTC mined) and Intel (sell some chips). But what's the incentive for the electronics manufacturer in embedding these BitSplit chips? If they're not getting a cut and they're not being paid, why would they integrate a chip even if it's free? The downside risk of embedding a chip that may become obsolete, break down, or negatively impact energy efficiency surely outweighs the marketing benefit of saying '21 inside'.

jnks 12y ago
21 will surely dole out some of their 75% cut to hardware integration partners as a distribution fee. The ripoff here is for anyone ignorant enough to run one of these devices.
ssharp 12y ago
Why is 25% a benefit? If these chips profitably mined bitcoins, it would make sense to run them yourself rather than give them away. 25% isn't going to cover the electricity used.
meragrin 12y ago
The way I read it, the 25% is not going to the user directly. It just simply goes into an account the manufacturer controls and is earmarked for the user. The user will only be able to spend it as the manufacturer allows. This is more along the lines of Google Opinion Rewards rather than being part of a mining group.
- ssharp 12y ago
  I have to wonder how they're going to market these things to people without breaking any consumer laws. It seems like you'd almost have to trick people into using them for any extended period of time (like after they get their first electric bill), which will make them a prime target for lawsuits, Attorneys General of every state, the FTC, Congress, etc.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago

zmanian 12y ago

21 is best understood as an attempt by the VC community to break the Chinese Bitcoin mining monopoly. 21 doesn't appear to be working on Lightning Network like layer 2 technologies that would make the Bitcoin micropayments for server bandwidth viable on the blockchain. In fact as useful financial applications of on chain transactions start to materialize, even P2P payments may start to struggle to be included in blocks. 21 faces one of the most profound information security problem faced by any company. They propose to put their companies capital assets into the homes of consumers and then extract value from those assets in a manner adversarial to the consumers interests. End users/attackers can do everything from blackhole the network traffic of the device to modify the firmware to target the hashing power to a new mining pool. Virtually any weakness in the engineering has the potential to be exploited at vast scale. This should terrify them.

pjc50 12y ago
I would say that 21 is an attempt to extract money from the VC community by pitching Bitcoin as the "next big thing". Given that this announcement doesn't seem to have official Intel press release backing, it's a little shady. I'm also skeptical about them getting to produce a small-run ASIC on Intel's incredibly valuable 22nm FinFET production line.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
> They propose to put their companies capital assets into the homes of consumers and then extract value from those assets in a manner adversarial to the consumers interests. End users/attackers can do everything from blackhole the network traffic of the device to modify the firmware to target the hashing power to a new mining pool. Virtually any weakness in the engineering has the potential to be exploited at vast scale. This should terrify them. Mark my words. If this or similar idea ever takes hold and begins to spread, I am going to start an open source project to hack those devices and redirect their hashing power where consumers want in as easy and streamlined way as possible so that everyone could do it. I'm tired of companies extracting value from customers in adversarial manner, literally telling their users "fuck you" in their faces.
- 12y ago

zhte415 12y ago

I'd wager a large amount of virtual currency that these are not specifically aimed at virtual currencies, but virtual implementations of real-world currencies.

ForHackernews 12y ago

Bitcoin is an environmental disaster. What a horrendous waste burning electricity and real, non-renewable natural resources to generate these tokens. For all people complain about the legacy financial system, bitcoin is a real zero-sum game where the more miners join, the harder the block difficulty gets, and the more coal gets burnt.

ikeboy 12y ago
As long as you capture the heat, it's not a waste. Also, how much energy does the legacy finance system waste? All the energy spent to build banks, armored trucks, secured networks, etc. A couple years back they spent a couple hundred million to build a cable connecting New York and London for financial data because it was 5 milliseconds faster than what they had before.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  First of all, I don't think we should be talking about waste in terms of money, but energy used. Surely, that NY-London cable was energetically expensive, but a big chunk on that money was probably created out of arbitrary whatever-they-do-on-Wall-Street and used to pay off people and various non-energy-related costs (e.g. land laws). Secondly, as wasteful as our current financial system is, it doesn't seem to have that strong growth factor built in. Making and maintaining bitcoins depends on ever increasing energy use; energy, which is wasted in the most literal sense - burned out on nonsense computations just to show that you had enough of it to burn. I think we should treat the energy used on financial system as upkeep - unavoidable cost we have to pay because as a species, we suck at coordinating, but that we'd do best to minimize.
  - ikeboy 12y ago
    First, in terms of raw energy, I'm pretty sure finance has bitcoin beat. Second, the energy used by bitcoin doesn't need to increase. The cost of all the energy used will tend towards the price of the subsidy+fees, and the subsidy is being phased out. In a few decades the subsidy will be almost gone. If bitcoin completely replaced finance, would it really use more energy than saved by finance stopping? And you didn't address the point about capturing the heat.

hendry 12y ago

Wish intel would have workable h264 hw acceleration on Linux instead.

hhw 12y ago
What are you talking about? H264 acceleration with Intel graphics on Linux has been around since 2010 with vaapi.

vectorpush 12y ago

Why would anyone agree to pay for 100% of the power consumption for an ASIC that only offers 25% of the returns? Consumers may not know anything about crypto-currencies but they understand basic math. When consumers are offered 5 dollars worth of bitcoin as compensation for a 20 dollar increase on their power bill they'll simply conclude "i guess that bitcoin thing really is a scam"

mikeash 12y ago
Surely the idea is that the return is more than 4x the cost of the power consumed, so that it's still a net gain for the buyer? It seems unlikely to me that this would actually work out in the long term, but wouldn't that be what they're going for?
- vectorpush 12y ago
  Then why wouldn't 21 just run the ASICs themselves and take 100% of the returns?
  - mikeash 12y ago
    That's a good question. For normal miners there's a similar question that's answered by a lack of unlimited capital. That wouldn't seem to apply here, since they're paying for the hardware themselves up-front and trying to recoup costs later. I can't figure out the answer here.
    - ikeboy 12y ago
      It doesn't make sense. There's no answer to figure out. If you have efficient miners, you either run them or sell them.
  - s73v3r 12y ago
    Then they have to pay for 100% of the power.
    - 12y ago

nivertech 12y ago

Nobody asked the most important question: "what's 21 Inc's plan in case of BTC exchange rate going south?"

s73v3r 12y ago

Intel will advertise these chips, and claim they have many in stock. They will take preorders in Bitcoin. The lead times will balloon out to several months, under the guise of "burn in testing". People will be angry at not getting their boards, and attempt to cancel their pre-orders. As they pre-ordered in BTC, however, they will not receive the same value back as they ordered, due to fluctuations in the price. A handful of people will receive their devices late, and by then the difficulty curve will have ramped up, making these devices not cost effective.